The Alaska Court of Appeals is reversing felony convictions for three defendants in connection with a riot at Fairbanks Correctional Center eight years ago.
The decision marks the first time an Alaska appellate court has analyzed the state’s criminal statute for rioting, which was adapted from Oregon’s and enacted in 1980.
The appeal stems from a 2018 verdict, when a Fairbanks jury found Patrick Burton-Hill, 31, Marcus Howard, 29, Jerald Burton Jr., 31, and Robert Gentleman III, 46, guilty of rioting and criminal mischief after their joint trial.
On Friday, the state appeals court published an opinion nixing the guilty verdict for all of them except Gentleman. It says then-Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Bethany Harbison misrepresented the criminal statute for the two felonies when instructing the jury, possibly skewing their verdict.
Harbison is now a judge on the Alaska Court of Appeals, but she is not listed among the co-authors in Friday’s opinion.
Gentleman is also challenging the verdict in a separate appeal, and the court docket for his case says it’s currently “ripe for a decision.”
The men were among 13 inmates charged with rioting and third-degree criminal mischief after refusing to move from one wing of the Fairbanks jail to another in 2017.
Court documents say the group shouted threats at corrections officers, broke windows and attempted to block off the wing by jamming a sliding gate with blankets and other objects.
Correctional center officials sought to quell the disturbance by calling on the Fairbanks Special Operations Response Team, which entered the wing after using tear gas to curb the inmates’ protest.
Court documents say that no officer or inmate was injured, but that state corrections department officials estimated the incident cost about $7,300 in property damage and cleanup.
According to Alaska’s rioting statute, a person commits the offense “if, while participating with five or more others, the person engages in tumultuous and violent conduct in a public place and thereby causes, or creates a substantial risk of causing, damage to property or physical injury to a person.”
The panel of appeals judges said in their decision Friday that Harbison gave flawed descriptions to the jury as to what the little-used rioting law meant by “participating with five or more others” and “tumultuous” conduct.
The appeals court wrote that the common law interpretation of a riot presupposes an explicit or implicit “mutual agreement” among the rioters and that Alaska criminal code does the same by default unless legislators single out and remove that condition. Their opinion says that Harbison mistakenly told jurors a mutual agreement was not a prerequisite in this case.
The appeals court’s opinion takes a similar tack when it comes to the meaning of “tumultuous.” They say the trial court described such conduct only as “loud, excited and chaotic.”
“This definition was, at best, an inexact and misleading approximation of the common-law element of ‘tumultuous’ or ‘turbulent’ conduct,” the judges wrote.
The shortcomings aren’t restricted to the rioting charge; Friday’s court opinion also says jurors needed better instructions if they were to properly weigh in on the criminal mischief offense.
A guilty verdict for that charge required the prosecution to show that defendants intentionally caused $1,000 or more in damage.
According to court documents, the prosecution alleged at trial that Gentleman was directly responsible for more than $1,000 of property damage during the riot, while the other three were “vicariously” responsible, meaning they didn’t inflict the damage but that their refusal to leave the wing still caused it.
Because of that framing, the appeals judges wrote that Harbison should have given jurors a legal definition of so-called “proximate causation” prior to jury deliberations, but did not.
Of the additional nine men charged in the 2017 fracas, six accepted agreements, pleading guilty to either rioting or criminal mischief, or having both charges dismissed as part of plea deals involving other offenses. The riot cases for the three other men – Tevyn Davis, 30, Anthony Heard, 49, and Justin West, 33 – no longer appear in CourtView, the Alaska Court System’s public access website.