Voices

Alaska needs more people like June Stein

If you are around politics long enough, you come to know there is but a single certainty: It is as nasty as the floor of a bologna factory, and twice as messy. Eventually, unless you have the soul of a dung beetle, it will turn your stomach.

Take, for instance, the shameful political ambush of June Stein.

Stein is the hard-nosed former Bethel district attorney sacked without warning as head of perhaps Alaska's busiest, most difficult rural prosecutor's office -- one dealing with an agonizing number of cases involving sex crimes and domestic violence.

"It's the toughest," says Stein, who should know. She has been a prosecutor for 25 years. In New Mexico. In Kenai. As part of a three-person traveling Alaska attorney general's rural prosecution team -- and in Bethel since 2011.

She and the office's six tireless young lawyers -- for most of them, Bethel is their first job -- had 1,400 cases open at any given time. The office operates in the Southwest Alaska regional hub that, per capita, has more sexual assaults and child sexual abuse than any place in the entire nation.

Was Stein counseled before she was blindsided? No. Advised something was wrong? No. Given any inkling of something amiss? No.

In a rare, if not unprecedented, turn of events for a rural prosecutor, she was dumped by the governor himself, a man she voted for, but never met. "Can I take that back?" she now wonders aloud, laughing.

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Sacking her apparently was important enough that a senior state lawyer was dispatched to the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta community on a weekend to personally deliver her termination letter as she completed one trial and prepped for the next. Her firing was part of the "transition," the letter said, and the lawyer brought with him her latest job evaluation. It rated her work -- ah, sweet irony -- as "exceptional."

The governor, with a foundering state to run and a gas line to screw up, inexplicably reached across hundreds of miles of frozen tundra to dump a tough prosecutor who spent her days getting justice for the innocent -- the victims of sexual violence, including children, for God's sake -- and facing down their attackers in court.

Why would he? Walker told Alaska Dispatch News she was "not a good fit"; he heard that from a "number of people." Oh, he offered no details -- a personnel matter, you know -- but when pressed, he confirmed one complainer was Bethel defense lawyer Jim Valcarce, a critic of Stein.

Valcarce -- Surprise! -- served on Walker's public safety committee during his transition and was a campaign contributor.

Stein is rigid, "a disaster for Bethel," Valcarce said in ADN. Not everybody agrees. Myron Angstman, a lawyer who has worked in Bethel for 40 years told APRN, "She's consistent, she works hard and she is competent."

Oddly enough, Stein says she hardly knows Valcarce; that "I've never talked to him at length; never had a case with him. He called one time and screamed at me; I've talked to him on the phone at a hearing ... that is about it."

Stein says she is unsure about the future. She plans a month off -- has a house to sell, a life, a career to reorganize. She says she is even unsure how she feels. "It's too complicated."

The Department of Law later told her it would find her a job in Anchorage, "some little out-of-the-way thing, probably," she says, but, "I don't know if I want to work with the department anymore. I don't know if I want to work for the governor anymore. They derailed my life."

She is heartened by an outpouring of support, though, likening it to "reading your own obituary and not having died." But there is anger and frustration, too, at her firing. "I'm not able to help. I had a lot of work still to do and now I can't do it."

What happened to Stein -- one of the good guys -- is wrong. In a community with the worst per capita sexual assault and child sexual abuse statistics -- in a state with the worst sexual assault and child sexual abuse statistics -- we need more Steins, not fewer. Now, her lieutenant in the Bethel office, prosecutor Chris Carpeneti, a veteran of seven years, has resigned. With the two of them gone, how is Alaska better off?

We need a Department of Law that is certain, swift death on sex crimes, domestic violence and assaults on children, not a rubber stamp for political payback. Stein's case illustrates why Alaska should have an elected attorney general insulated from the political pressure and blatant interference of any governor.

What happened to her -- and Alaska -- is enough to make a dung beetle reach for the Maalox.

Paul Jenkins is editor of the AnchorageDailyPlanet.com, a division of Porcaro Communication

This story is posted on Alaska Dispatch as part of Eye on the Arctic, a collaborative partnership between public and private circumpolar media organizations.

Paul Jenkins

Paul Jenkins is a former Associated Press reporter, managing editor of the Anchorage Times, an editor of the Voice of the Times and former editor of the Anchorage Daily Planet.

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