A leading Alaska lawmaker says the state needs to hire twice as many prosecutors and public defenders if it wants to end the extreme court delays that the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica have exposed over the past year.
Rep. Andrew Gray, chairman of Alaska’s legislative committee that oversees the state’s court system, prosecutors and public defenders, said media coverage of years-delayed criminal cases “stings me in the heart.” Alaska’s most serious felony cases now take three years to resolve, more than twice as long as in 2015.
“I hate how slow this system is. It’s killing me,” Gray said.
He said the blame should lie with the state of Alaska, which did not hire enough prosecutors and public defenders, rather than front-line lawyers.
Gray is the latest official to respond to Daily News and ProPublica articles that revealed how delays can harm criminal defendants and crime victims alike.
Alaska Supreme Court Chief Justice Susan M. Carney said in February that the system “has not lived up to our own expectations or the expectations of Alaskans” when it comes to speedily dispensing justice. The following month, the court ordered new restrictions on pretrial continuations.
But Gray said achieving the goal of resolving more cases quickly will require new resources beyond court orders. The court system’s own standards for speedy trials set a deadline of 120 days, but this deadline is rarely met.
(Mr. Gray pointed out in an interview, and Mr. Carney also pointed out in his speech to Congress, that the median time to resolve misdemeanors is much faster than most felonies. Class B misdemeanors (crimes such as mischief and shoplifting) are resolved in a median of about four months, Mr. Carney said.)
Victim advocates, lawyers and judges told Newsroom that Alaska has been plagued by mounting delays for decades.
Gray said lawmakers who drafted a state spending plan to begin the new legislative session Tuesday should include additional funding to reduce the number of cases prosecutors and public defenders handle.
“I don’t know exactly what the number is, but it’s going to be a big number,” Gray said. “And yes, I absolutely support that.”
120 days
Alaska’s Speedy Trial Deadline.
1,124 days
Median time taken to resolve the most serious category of felony cases in Alaska in 2025. This is more than double the number in 2015.
Former Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Nieje Steinkruger, who served as a public defender and assistant attorney general, agreed that staffing shortages are straining lawyers on both sides who are required to quickly resolve cases.
“Those lawyers are just in a terrible position. They’re Type A personalities and they want to do the best they can.”
Jacqueline Shepherd, an attorney with the ACLU of Alaska who tracks pretrial delays, agreed with the need for more front-line lawyers. A 1998 Congressional audit found that public defenders can “ethically” handle no more than 59 cases at a time. Sheppard said some Anchorage public defenders are being asked to juggle 140-170, and “it’s clearly too much of a burden on them.”
But adding more staff isn’t enough to solve the problem, she says. He said judges need to start pushing back against Alaska’s culture of court delays and ensure cases move toward trial or dismissal.
Alaska’s House and Senate are now run by bipartisan majorities, so Gray, a Democrat from traditionally red Alaska, became chairman of the Judiciary Committee.
His proposal for more funding is likely to prove difficult in a state that has no state income or sales tax and faces a revenue shortfall exacerbated by low oil prices.
In December, Gov. Mike Dunleavy (R) proposed a plan that would increase the annual oil wealth dividend per resident to $3,650, a much larger increase than in previous years, while also boosting services with spending from reserves. The dividend payments would cost twice as much as Dunleavy requested for public safety, courts and prisons.
A spokesperson for the governor did not directly answer a question about whether Dunleavy supports doubling the number of prosecutors and state’s defenders. However, the spokesperson noted that funding for prosecutors and defense attorneys has already increased under Dunleavy to reduce caseload and backlog.
74 Delay
The number of times an Anchorage sexual assault case was postponed to reach a jury in 10 years.
Spending for the Department of Justice, which employs state prosecutors, was $123 million last year, a 42% increase from 2018, when Dunleavy was elected, according to state budget documents. Spending for the two agencies that oversee public defenders was a combined $87 million, an increase of 69%. Expenditures for the Ministry of Public Security increased at the same rate.
“Improving public safety has been a top priority throughout Governor Dunleavy’s tenure,” said Press Secretary Grant Robinson.
The budget increases for defense attorneys and prosecutors were also influenced by legislation passed in 2022 as part of an effort to raise salaries and improve retention and recruitment.
Gray said the effort is a good first step to help fill the vacancy. But he said the next step is to expand the workforce.
“They need to realize that even when they are fully staffed, they still overwork the public. That’s why we see incidents like this going on forever,” he said.
But House Finance Co-Chairman Andy Josephson (D-Anchorage) said efforts to double the number of lawyers are unlikely to succeed this year. The state is strapped for cash, he said.
“It’s the same reason why the Anchorage School District has a $78 million budget deficit,” said Josephson, a former prosecutor who oversaw the Department of Justice’s budget and proposed a bill to increase the state’s attorney’s salary. “For decades, we’ve been trying to give people dividends without taxing them, but these two things are exhausting the system.”
During the same period, victims’ rights advocates noticed increasingly longer delays in the most serious criminal cases.
Some cases lasted so long that the victims died before they could be brought to justice, such as the two women who were sexually assaulted in broad daylight in one of Anchorage’s most popular parks. The attack occurred in 2017, but it took seven years and 50 delays for the case to go to trial in December 2024. The jury found the defendant, Fred Tom Hurley III, guilty of two counts of second-degree sexual assault, but not guilty of one count of sexual assault.
Another case took even longer, 10 years. During that time, the judge granted 74 delays, but no one in court asked the victim what she wanted. A key witness died on the way. A jury in April found the defendant, Raffi Faualo, guilty of first-degree sexual assault and first-degree assault with a weapon, but acquitted him of one count of sexual assault.
Faualo’s attorneys had about 375 active cases before trial.
59 items
According to the Alaska Legislative Audit Office, the maximum ethical workload for one prosecutor or defense attorney.
In another example of extreme delays, Kipnuk resident Justin Paul spent seven years in prison for murder after being indicted after key blood evidence was found to be flawed within a year. Meanwhile, the murder of his girlfriend Eunice Whitman remains unsolved, with the investigation only recently reopened.
State officials say the situation has improved since a state Supreme Court order limiting pretrial delays went into effect in May.
As of Jan. 1, 2026, there were 743 pending felony cases that were more than two years old, representing 16% of all felonies, Alaska Court System spokeswoman Rebecca Cauford said. This is an improvement from January 1, 2024, when there were 1,428 similar cases, accounting for 22% of the total.
Cofford said the court’s order on the delay, combined with early efforts in 2023, “led to significant progress.” “Judges have utilized every available resource to limit the continuance of litigation, build up cases, and advance cases quickly and fairly.”
Still, the Alaska Criminal Justice Data Analysis Commission’s most recent annual report notes that cases continue to take longer to resolve than before 2019.
Gray acknowledged that it will be very difficult to get lawmakers to agree on an increase in attorney fees.
“But we have to have that discussion because that’s how we solve this problem,” he said.
