It is with a heavy heart we received the news that Scott Davison has passed away. If not for his courage, and the core decency that left him tormented for many years with the information he had in this case, four innocent men would still be in prison.
Scott Davison was an innocent bystander and child when he heard the unsolicited murder confession of Jason Wallace, and the threats on his own life that followed. This burden was a heavy one and it weighed Scott down tremendously on the already thorny road from adolescence to adulthood. His is a life shaped harshly by this miscarriage of justice and a reminder that in wrongful conviction many suffer.
Scott Davison came forward first in this case and came forward bravely. He did something hard, something selfless, and he will always be remembered by us for this act. He risked his life to do the right thing. He was an agent of truth and justice. Rest In Peace Scott Davison,
We were deeply saddened to receive news of Arlo Olson’s passing and further disheartened to learn that he took his own life while in custody.
Prison is just a few short weeks in the past for the four men who served eighteen years for a crime they did not forget. With freedom has come the opportunity to begin what will surely be a lifelong task of reflecting on their experience. They like to focus on the victory and its blessings more than the difficulty of enduring eighteen long years of incarceration. But today, the men discuss what it felt like to be locked up.
“Yeah,” Kevin interjects, “But it didn’t take no two weeks. It took years and we had to force ourselves to get used to it. So we wouldn’t go crazy. When you’re in there innocent it’s all unreal.”
“And then to think, ” George continues, “I had to face another eleven years, or more, it almost did me in. The attorneys meant well but once they lose they are gone too, during the appeal process they were people I spoke with, they provided hope and I relied on this hope, and it fell through, and they disappear. Just extreme isolation. The hopelessness. But I know why I pulled through – easy. My daughter. I didn’t want to hurt her, and that was my only reason. It was enough for me at that time I was willing to keep going, even if all that was ahead was suffering, if it spared her. I read about suicide, and it discussed the impact suicide has on other people and the psychology that fuels you. It underscored that my actions could affect her. So I stayed. I survived.”
The four men, who were freed through a settlement agreement with the state of Alaska on the heels of a five week post-conviction relief hearing, sat down together for the first time to speak out about their experience and update supporters on their progress, answer reader and supporter questions, and discuss their lives since their recent release.
Shelmar Johnson, longtime drug dealer, burglar, who supplied weapons for at least one murder, is currently in Orlando, Florida.
Marquez Penninton, longtime drug dealer and woman beater, is here in the greater Fairbanks area, sharing streets with our children, exactly where the entire community was terrified the killers of John Hartman would end up back in 1997.
William Holmes is in prison in California, because after you failed to arrest him for killing John Hartman, he killed two young men execution style an dumped them on the highway before heading off to execute his plan to kill an entire family including a little girl. Again, it’s important to arrest killers. They kill people. Like human people. Kind of a huge deal.
Jason Wallace is in prison in Seward, which the FPD and state know, because they’re in pretty tight with him. And he is there because after they failed to arrest him for killing John Hartman he….yes, he killed more people. Again, we need to arrest killers because of the killing. But Wallace is in a category all his own. Last time he was in a squad car it was for killing an unarmed woman with a hammer, after which an officer took him to McDonalds because he felt bad Wallace would not be eating a burger for a long time. Unfortunately, he cannot be prosecuted for killing John Hartman because the State gave him immunity in the obscene effort to keep innocent men in prison. He CAN however be prosecuted for the perjury for lying on the stand.
Hundreds or people filled the hallway of the fifth floor of the Fairbanks Superior courthouse yesterday, gathered around two closed doors bearing the words “Confidential Hearing Do Not Enter.” They came one by one, trickling in to wait together, again, for justice. Grandmothers with their scarves and crochet needles, babies hanging from their mother’s hips, teenagers playing on their phones, nurses on lunch break, a relocated e-board meeting, beggars, CEO’s, activists, priests, people – they all came, and they waited.
Because eighteen years ago men in power took away four boys for a crime they did not commit on a whim and a terrible miscalculation. Four boys. Children. They did not care whether or not they were guilty, just believed they were disposable. That they would be forsaken and forgotten because they could not see them as human beings with value equal to their own children, because that is the dehumanizing reality of racism and bias. They were so, so wrong. It’s beautiful, really, how wrong they were.
The average citizen of the free world tends to understand and accept that attacks on freedom of speech happened unabated through history, yet still believe that such attacks are part of the past. That is because the average citizen goes to work, comes home to catch some prime time television, throws the occasional political meme up on their Facebook wall, and expresses their more radical beliefs at their own tables. In short, the average citizen does not live in a state of oppression, and does not speak out in high visibility situations about the oppression or unjust actions taken by the government that they observe. And thus, tales of attacks on civil rights leaders, corruption, abuses of power, are relegated to the history channel documentaries on the 60’s or Richard Nixon and the like.
In July of 2015 the State of Alaska served a “subpoena duces tecem” on this blogger for testimony and collection of my personal AND work emails, letters, communications of all kind, writings, and more. The full scope of the subpoena is pictured here. A subpoena duces tecem is used to take property and information into the custody. It is a Latin phrase which translates as “you will bring with you under penalty of punishment.”
It is worth noting that the questions were not relevant to the Fairbanks Four case, and were stereotypical attacks of a power figure against a woman. Revelation of deviant past behavior, attacks on maternal identity, and sexual relationships or sexual history, though certainly not relevant to the case, are a classic targets when attempting to discredit any woman. And we should all be concerned at the idea of the government slut-shaming outspoken women. That said, look backward, and look forward. There has always been an organized overkill response to women who are too outspoken or who possess political power that makes the powers that be uncomfortable. The Salem Witch trials come to mind. Scarlet letters. Stolen children. The many thousands of land owning widows who faced execution, wrongful conviction, displacement. The woman, who, right now as you read this, is being hung or stoned to death or beheaded or otherwise silenced by death for failing to accept the terms of her specific oppression,. Beheaded and deposed is a far cry from one another. Yet, we cannot regard any action on the spectrum as acceptable without condoning the ideology that fuels attacks on the outspoken. And my specific experience is worth talking about only because it is universal, and because I am so ordinary. If the government can go through all of my stuff and ask me those questions, they could do that to anyone. And I was far from the only person under scrutiny in this case.
One piece of evidence was introduced, and then rejected by the court, as “evidence” of my gang affiliation. It was a letter from Eugene Vent some years ago. In a six-page diatribe about the evils or racism and how the prison system encourages the internalization of racist stereotypes as a means of control, how that same prison system is a microcosm of society, and racism and identity by ethnicity is a construction of the majority to oppress the minority, Eugene used the word “brotherhood,” and once he capitalized it. He also capitalized words like “defense,” “potential,” and “tomorrow.” To my sincere frustration, Eugene does not use capital letters or quotation marks appropriately all the time. Yet, that does not mean I am in a gang, only that I was correct when I warned him that alternative grammar has unintended consequences (or “Consequences” as he might say). Nor does it mean that anyone was assaulted.
The bearded and bespectacled man on the witness stand looked every bit the part of reporter and professor as eyes darted from one end of the courtroom to the other, following the volley of words between attorneys arguing about the man’s very presence in the courtroom. The notion alone of a reporter on the witness stand who has neither witnessed a crime nor participated in one, but has simply researched and written articles, is unsettling enough to spark debate. Over the objections of media attorney John McKay, to the horror of fellow journalists, and the great fascination of spectators, the reporter was indeed called to testify in the evidentiary hearing for four men who are widely believed to be wrongfully convicted of an eighteen year old murder.
The convictions of the four accused rested very heavily on the eye witness testimony of a man named Arlo Olson, whose testimony was the subject of the letter to the editor that sparked O’Donoghue’s curiosity. Olson was presented at trial as a moral man doing his rather heroic civic duty by coming forward with his account of seeing the four accused men together that night. But O’Donoghue rapidly uncovered a more complex vision of the star witness than the one presented at court, and subsequently printed in the media. Olson was facing charges for beating a pregnant woman when he came forward as a witness. Some months later he was granted a sentence with no jail time, with the judge’s stated motivation for the leniency that Olson had “assisted authorities.” Olson was a far cry from the academic and clean-cut young man the jury was led to believe stood before them, and in fact had a long and troubling criminal record. O’Donoghue also realized that Olson had been standing 550 feet away from the assault he claimed to have witnessed, in the dark, drunk, and in a crowd of people who all claimed to have seen nothing. O’Donoghue’s earliest research into the star witness produced even more startling revelations that the transcripts and public records. Olson had recanted, multiple times, including to the prosecuting attorney for the state who threatened Olson with perjury if he refused to testify.
The articles consumed the front page of the paper for seven consecutive days and revealed the many inconsistencies in the investigation, the Olson inconsistencies, unearthed an illegal jury experiment, explored the details of the alleged confessions, presented the possibility of alternate suspects, and generally revealed to the community of Fairbanks that the case that had shocked them all in its brutality yet strengthened their faith in local justice may not be what it initially appeared. The series also gave a public voice for the first time to many Native community members and leaders who had long held the four were innocent.
Alongside the reporter and professor under fire in the courtroom, the very concept of freedom of the press and freedom of speech in Alaska came under scrutiny. As the reporter’s phone calls were played and his emails were read line by line, there was a message between the lines clearly communicated to the press of Alaska – if you write something your government doesn’t like, there are consequences.
The Fairbanks Four 