Alaska Senate panel unveils crime package with tougher drug penalties and grand jury changes

JUNEAU — The Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday unveiled an omnibus crime bill, which combines various criminal justice reform proposals into a single package as the end of the legislative session nears.

The 39-page crime bill — House Bill 66 — has tougher penalties for drug offenses after Alaska reported its highest-ever rate of fatal opioid overdoses in 2023. The bill also includes changes to what evidence is admissible in grand juries, which is intended to protect victims of crime. There are also provisions to close a loophole with the state’s sex offender registry.

Under the bill, crime victims would not need to present in-person at grand juries. That change would allow law enforcement officials to summarize a victim’s testimony or to show a video of the victim’s testimony at grand jury proceedings. Groups such as the Alaska Children’s Alliance spoke in support of that change and said it was particularly critical for younger crime victims.

“Being forced by the Alaskan legal process to re-tell about traumatizing events, in front of a large group of strangers at grand jury, adds unnecessary trauma to already traumatized children,” a statement from the group said.

Thirty-three states allow evidence to be presented to grand juries that way to secure an indictment, which is constitutionally required in Alaska for a felony charge to proceed to court. Anchorage Democratic Sen. Matt Claman, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that change would bring the state of Alaska in line with grand jury processes at a federal level. He said that would be particularly impactful for victims of sexual assault and abuse.

”It’s a significant step in protecting victims’ rights,” he said about the provisions proposed by the Dunleavy administration.

Another set of provisions proposed by the Dunleavy administration in the Senate’s bill would impact the state’s sex offender registry.

In 2019, lawmakers passed a measure that required out-of-state sex offenders to be listed on the state’s sex offender registry when they moved to Alaska. But the change was not retroactive, meaning that if an offender was convicted of a sex offense prior to 2019, they do not need to register in Alaska. HB 66 would close that loophole.

“I think it was more of a drafting error than anything,” Claman said.

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The sex offender registry provisions and those related to grand juries were cited last week by Republican Reps. Craig Johnson and Sarah Vance as being key legislative priorities for the Republican-led House majority this year. Claman on Monday cited those two policy changes as the most significant provisions in the measure.

Another set of provisions came from a bill, which passed the Senate last year, that was intended to close a loophole related to involuntary commitments. Angela Harris was stabbed at Anchorage’s Loussac Library two years ago, which left her in a wheelchair. A judge had found her attacker incompetent to stand trial on charges linked to random attacks on two other women in Midtown Anchorage months earlier.

Those provisions, proposed by Claman, require the state to petition for such individuals to be involuntarily committed in a psychiatric institute if they have committed certain violent felony offenses and been found incompetent to stand trial. The bill would also extend allowable involuntary commitment periods from the current maximum of 180 days to two years.

Civil liberties groups have raised concerns about the impact of longer involuntary commitments on constitutional due process rights. The Disability Law Center of Alaska has been concerned how the long-strained Alaska Psychiatric Institute would handle extra patients.

A proposal from Vance that passed the House in March also was included in the Senate’s crime package. It would rename “child pornography” in state statute to “child sex abuse material.” Vance said last week that “this is crimes against children.” She said that new terminology would better reflect the nature of the crime.

Tougher drug penalties

A contentious set of provisions in the bill aims to address the staggering rise of deaths in Alaska related to fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that can be 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine.

A person convicted of distributing opioids or meth that directly results in someone’s death would now face a second-degree murder charge instead of manslaughter. Penalties would increase from a maximum of 20 years in prison to a mandatory minimum of 15 years and a maximum of 99 years.

In a brief interview after Monday’s hearing, Claman spoke in support of longer of sentences for drug offenses after Alaska had seen an almost 40% spike in opioid deaths in the past year.

“People are dying from access to illegal drugs,” he said. “And I think under the circumstances, it’s appropriate to have that higher penalty.”

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Someone convicted of giving another person opioids can currently face a sentence of four to seven years in prison; HB 66 would increase the maximum sentence for that offense to 11 years. There would be no minimum quantities of those drugs to receive the maximum sentence.

While the fentanyl crisis has been cited as the reason for the tougher penalties, the bill would apply those penalties more broadly to the two most serious state schedules for drugs. Those schedules include drugs such as heroin and oxycodone, but also ecstasy and psychedelic mushrooms.

Supporters of tougher drug penalties say they can act as a deterrent and they can incentivize lower-level drug dealers to testify against higher-level traffickers.

“We need to make it very, very clear. You have no excuse when you are dealing fentanyl to innocent people. We’re going to bring the fullest extent of law to you,” Vance said at a news conference last week.

At Monday’s hearing, Angela Kemp, director of the Alaska Department of Law’s criminal division, answered questions from Democrats on how longer custodial sentences would effectively address Alaska’s fentanyl crisis.

“While, certainly, incarceration alone is never going to be the solution to all of our problems, I think it is a part of encouraging individuals to help through the rehabilitation process. And I realize that may sound naive, and maybe silly in context, but it does, in fact, work itself out,” she said.

Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans have largely been more skeptical that second-degree murder charges will reduce the demand for drugs or that they will be effective in securing convictions for traffickers. According to the Alaska Court System, there have been two manslaughter convictions for drug-induced homicides in the past 15 years.

Multiple national-level studies have found that treating the opioid crisis as a public health emergency, rather than with harsher criminal enforcement, has been more effective. Some Alaska recovery advocates said last year that harsher sentences targeting drug traffickers would invariably be applied against drug users.

The latest version of HB 66 had its first hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee on Monday. It is scheduled to be heard in the Finance Committee on Friday. The regular legislative session must end by midnight on May 15.