Alaska Felony Process: 1999

Abstract

The Alaska Supreme Court's Advisory Committee on Fairness and Access recommended that the state assess the relationships between defendants' ethnicities and their treatment by the criminal justice system. At the time of the request, the disproportionate numbers of ethnic minorities at all points in Alaska's criminal justice system were well-known.

The main purpose of this work was to identify whether. those disproportions resulted from unjustifiable reasons and amounted to discrimination. Another purpose was to identify other unwarranted disparities, if they existed, based on the defendant's gender, the defendant's type of attorney, the location of the defendant's case, or other inappropriate characteristics. A third purpose was to update descriptive data about the criminal justice system. The Judicial Council collected and examined data from Alaska felony cases from 1999, beginning from the time formal charges were filed through case dispositions by way of dismissal, acquittal, or sentencing. At the time charges were initially filed, the Alaska felony defendants in these cases included disproportionally large numbers of young males, Alaska Natives, and Blacks.

The report showed that, after charges were filed, justice for felony defendants in Alaska was, in many respects, substantially equal....In the area of non-presumptive sentencing, sentences were uniformly imposed among ethnic groups in all but Drug offenses. The disparity in this category was limited to Blacks in Anchorage and to Natives outside Anchorage.

Matt Berman and Stephanie Martin at the UAA Institute for Social and Economic Research contributed the multivariate analyses used in this report.