ANCHORAGE, Alaska (KTUU) – After the murder of three Anchorage residents — a husband, wife and the wife’s sister — in 1985, Winona Fletcher was sentenced to 135 years in prison for her role in the grisly killings.
She was charged in the case when she was just 14 years old.
Now, following a new court of appeals ruling, she has the chance to have her case reexamined.
Last year, the Alaska Court of Appeals found that when sentencing juvenile defendants, the trial courts must consider on the record how juveniles are fundamentally different from adults.
Advertisement
On Aug. 9 of this year, the appeals court came to the conclusion that that decision is to be retroactive, and thus should also apply to past offenders — including Fletcher.
“We agree with the superior court’s conclusion that the Fletcher decision should be fully retroactive to those cases on collateral review, where juvenile offenders have received the functional equivalent of a life without parole sentence,” the ruling stated.
Fletcher and her 19-year-old boyfriend were sentenced for the murders of Tom Faccio, 69; his wife, Ann Faccio, 70; and Ann’s sister, Emelia Elliot, who was 75 years old at the time of her death.
With the conviction in the case, Fletcher was the youngest female to ever be convicted of murder in Alaska.
Fletcher’s attorney, Marcy McDannel, said that the state’s court of appeals is following a broader national trend regarding harsher sentences given to youth offenders, which she said started with the U.S. Supreme Court. She said that while Alaska is far from the forefront — and is actually lagging behind — she believes the state is unquestionably moving in the right direction.
Advertisement
“This decision recognizes the science that says that children don’t have fully developed brains and are very much at the mercy of their environment,” McDannel said. “That has a huge impact on their behavior, and that needs to be taken into consideration when deciding how we treat children, even when they’ve done something terrible.”
Suki Miller, however, disagrees. Miller serves as the executive director of Victims For Justice, which was founded in 1985 by Janice Faccio Lienhart and Sharon Faccio Nahorney, the two daughters of Tom and Ann Faccio.
Miller said that every time there is a new hearing of any kind, it retraumatizes victims and their family members, making the process of moving forward and healing nearly impossible.
“They’re always talking about, maybe, that they’ve been in there for a long time,” Miller said. “Victims are dead for a long time, they don’t come back, they don’t get second chances, they don’t get hearings, they’re gone.
“So it’s really hard for victims to go through that, and hear the different types of rehabilitation that the offender was able to have when their loved ones will never have that chance.”
Advertisement
Resentencing for Fletcher under the new criteria is currently scheduled for December 2024.
McDannel, who said Fletcher’s original sentence is now unconstitutional under Alaska statute, said the state is making efforts to have the Alaska Supreme Court review the court of appeals’ decision before the resentencing, which could potentially hold the process up for an undetermined amount of time.
She added that she’s hopeful the courts will allow the process to move forward, to give Fletcher the benefit of the appeals court’s ruling.
A 200-foot piece of dirt road that was punched into Katmai National Park and Preserve 10 years ago has been removed so the site can be revert to its natural state, protecting archaeological features there.
The small bit of road near Lake Brooks was built by mistake, without proper consultation with regional Native tribes and Native organizations, the National Park Service said. It wound up covering parts of two underground sod homes, sites known in Alutiiq culture as ciqluaqs and in Russian as barabaras.
Originally intended as tool to shorten an existing service road and help keep vehicles from getting too close to an historic cabin that had been hit a couple of times by buses, the road section was never actually used, said Mark Sturm, Katmai’s superintendent. The problems it caused became apparent shortly after it was built in the summer of 2014, he said.
“It was not appropriate for us to have done that, and certainly not to have done it in the absence of having done our due diligence,” said Sturm, who was not at Katmai at the time. Construction of the road section “upset a bunch of people,” he said.
Advertisement
“The biggest thing that we did wrong was to have done that work without having done proper consultation and without having done proper historic preservation,” he said.
The removal, which was completed last week, required some delicate work, including some hand digging around the two barabara sites, Sturm said. It was also the subject of an agreement between several Native organizations and the park, and a tribal representative monitored the work, according to the park.
Beyond this bit of road, the park has reformed its practices to ensure proper tribal consultation and prevent any similar problems in the future, Sturm said. “We have our ducks in our row,” he said. “We’re doing it right now.”
Katmai National Park and Preserve, which sprawls over 4 million acres, is known for its salmon-eating bears, its lakes and its volcanic landscapes. It is the setting for an annual online event called Fat Bear Week, which has drawn global audiences of people casting their votes for the bears considered to have been most successful at packing on weight in preparation for winter hibernation.
Katmai has been part of the U.S. national park system for more than a century. It was established as a national preserve in 1918, then expanded several times later until it was established in its present form through the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act.
JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — The Alaska Supreme Court is set to hear a case Thursday that will decide whether a measure to repeal the state’s new open primary and ranked choice general election system will remain on the November ballot.
The parties arguing the case in Anchorage are seeking a ruling from the state’s high court by Sept. 3.
Three voters who sued to disqualify the measure from the ballot are challenging Superior Court Judge Christina Rankin’s decision in June that the state Division of Elections complied with deadlines and acted within its authority when it allowed sponsors of the repeal measure to fix errors with petition booklets after they were already turned in.
Advertisement
Rankin in a subsequent decision found instances in which the signature-gathering process was not properly carried out by repeal supporters, and she disqualified those booklets. But the appeal focuses on the deadline questions.
Getting an initiative on the ballot requires signature gathering. People who circulate petition booklets must attest to meeting certain requirements and have their affidavits notarized or certified.
The Division of Elections found problems with more than 60 petition booklets — most of which involved a person whose notary commission had expired — and began notifying the initiative sponsors of the problems on Jan. 18, six days after the petition was turned in, attorneys for the state and plaintiffs have said.
The sponsors of the repeal measure ultimately returned 62 corrected booklets before the division completed its signature count in March. Attorneys on both sides have said the measure would not meet the signature requirements to qualify for the ballot if the 62 booklets were thrown out.
The 2020 initiative replaced party primaries with open primaries and instituted ranked vote general elections. Under the open primary system, voters are asked to pick one candidate per race, with the top four vote-getters, regardless of party affiliation, advancing to the general election.
Advertisement
The new system was first used in 2022 and is being used again for this year’s elections. Many of this year’s legislative races had fewer than four candidates in the primary.
Supporters of ranked choice voting say it gives voters more choice and rewards candidates who appeal to a broader portion of the electorate. Opponents say it’s confusing and pushes voters to rank candidates they don’t necessarily support.
Get Today in Politics
A digest of the top political stories from the Globe, sent to your inbox Monday-Friday.
/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/gray/26EESEEORJBM3F2HXBIOSEZ4QE.png "Court of Appeals orders resentencing in 1985 Winona Fletcher triple murder case")
