Editorial: Death penalty is not the necessary conversation

Rep. Mike Chenault, R-Nikiski, has stated his intention to start a discussion about protecting Alaskans from violent crimes. While that’s a noble aim and would be a valuable conversation, by submitting House Bill 9, which would reinstate the death penalty in Alaska, he takes the discussion in the wrong direction.

The Alaska Territorial Legislature abolished the death penalty in 1957, with good reason. Moral concerns aside, the practicality and common-sense arguments against state executions are too weighty to overcome.

As Chenault himself points out in a post on his blog, www.mikechenault.com, death row is expensive. The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice found in 2008 that confining an inmate to death row, compared to a sentence of life without parole, is $90,000 more per inmate. On the federal level, a 2008 report by the Office of Defender Services found that a federal murder case in which the death penalty is sought costs about $620,932 — eight times more than a murder case not seeking execution.

As Speaker of the House, Chenault displays a disappointingly laissez-faire attitude about state expenses, especially in trying financial times: “Frankly, I don’t believe that cost should get in the way of dispensing true justice. How do you measure the cost of peace of mind? Most of us would sleep better at night knowing a criminal will never have the opportunity to harm another human being.”

While doing what’s right isn’t always synonymous with doing what’s cheapest, in this situation, there is a more cost-effective, as well as overall effective, solution:

Life without parole. Not only is it less expensive than reinstating the death penalty, it also avoids the risk of executing the wrong person. Chenault says the death penalty should only be used in “cases where there is no question of guilt or innocence,” and that he’s included safeguards in his bill to “help ensure that people are not wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death.”

When we’re talking about life and death, “help ensure” is simply not good enough. In a justice system predicated upon “reasonable doubt” — not absolute, 100 percent certainty — there’s always at least a fraction of a chance of a mistake, especially when human error is an ever-present possibility. The only way to absolutely ensure the wrong people aren’t put to death is to not kill them.

When considering the larger goals of sentencing — protecting the public from repeat offenders and deterring future crime — the death penalty is not the best way to achieve those aims.

Life without parole is just as effective at preventing criminals from harming anyone else, especially if Chenault had proposed a bill seeking to strengthen life sentences. As for preventing heinous crimes, the threat of the death penalty is not a deterrent. Expecting it to be means expecting violent criminals to employ rational thought. If they did that, they wouldn’t have committed such crimes in the first place.

Murderers, terrorists, serial killers — by definition, they are not reasonable individuals. If they are deranged enough to perpetrate violence on such a monstrous scale, chances are they won’t pause beforehand to consider which state they’re in and what the maximum penalty might be if they are caught, lose their jury trail and exhaust all their appeals.

Common sense is borne out by research — information from the Death Penalty Information Center shows that states without the death penalty have consistently lower murder rates than states with the death penalty.

Chenault says so himself — “People who commit the most monstrous of crimes will not have the opportunity to reoffend if a death sentence is imposed … while I don’t believe it’s a deterrent to crime, I believe it should be an option for the justice system to brandish against the most heinous unremorseful criminals in our society.”

Protection of human rights and safety should be the highest priority of our justice and related social systems. If even Chenault doesn’t believe the death penalty will deter violent crime, what’s the point of introducing the measure?

Time and discussion would be much better spent on other aims — strengthening sentencing for the most heinous crimes, helping murder victims’ families and investing in education, rehabilitation, employment and social service programs proven to help prevent crime and keep criminals from reoffending.

Let’s breathe life into those areas and keep the death penalty buried.

Editorial: Count goose eggs before they hatch

Gov. Sarah Palin announced her budget plan for the next fiscal year Monday. Her address to legislators was laden with phrases that smack of fiscal responsibility — “We’ve got to be prudent,” “save for the future,” “live within our means.”

As a whole, the budget reflects those themes. Spending on capital projects is reduced more than $300 million from this year, money for resource rebate checks is cut out and general fund spending is whittled down.

Palin said the budget represents a 7 percent reduction in overall spending — although there’s some debate about the validity of that figure, since it doesn’t include the money Palin proposes spending from the Alaska Housing Capital Corporation savings fund the Legislature created three years ago. Factoring that in, it’s more like a 5 percent reduction.
Either way, a smaller budget is good for Alaska, considering the declining price of oil and uncertainty about future economic conditions.

The problem is, it may not be small enough. In order for Palin’s budget to do all the wonderful things she says it will — provide necessary services, live within our means and save for the future — oil prices will need to average $74.41 a barrel next year. The price is at $38.76 right now,

It doesn’t take a state Revenue Department adviser to realize that’s a significant difference. And it shouldn’t take a clairvoyant to point out this year’s plunge in prices was not expected when the state budget was created last winter. Neither Palin’s administration nor the Legislature saw this coming. As a result, the state is expecting to spend more than $400 million from its savings to balance this year’s budget.

Prices may well dip again and stay lower than Palin’s administration expects. The state should be ready for that by setting a budget that prepares for that possibility.

The budget should focus on priorities — essential services, vital capital projects and investing in the future through supporting health, economic development and education initiatives. It also should keep nonessential capital projects on a waiting list and start them if and when money becomes available.

And don’t forget the part about saving for the future. As this year shows, paying for current cloudy vision takes foresight from the past.

Municipal conference would prioritize projects based on boroughwide benefit

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

When it comes to legislative funding, “we” gets more attention than “me.”

That’s the idea behind the formation of a Kenai Peninsula Municipal Conference, an organization that will lobby for legislative funding for projects on a boroughwide basis.

John Torgerson, executive director of the Kenai Peninsula Economic Development District, rolled out the plan to form a municipal conference at a Kenai Peninsula Community Development Forum held Oct. 24 at the Challenger Learning Center of Alaska in Kenai.

He hopes to have involvement from the borough government, city governments, chambers of commerce and tribal governments from across the borough. Representatives will consider projects from Hope to Homer, Seward to Tyonek, and vote on which ones to pass on to the Legislature for support.

“This organization will take these projects from a regional level and make them a boroughwide issue,” Torgerson said.

Instead of Seward stumping for its own funding, or Kenai seeking money for its issues, a municipal conference would prioritize projects on a boroughwide level. A project would need to win the votes of three-fourths of the members of the municipal conference to make it on the priorities list.

“That’s how you get out of that regional, ‘I want to build my road in my backyard,’ approach. This is about the borough … all of us together,” Torgerson said.

“In that statement comes the strength of the organization because it is about the borough and it’s about priorities, and it has a pretty high bar to make the list.”

The organization is in its infancy. Bylaws are being drawn up, with reference to other municipal conferences in the state, Torgerson said. The ins and outs of how it will work are still being decided.

Torgerson said he is past president of a previous Kenai Peninsula municipal conference that was started in 1986 by former borough Mayor Stan Thompson. Funding for that organization fizzled out in 1997, he said. By that time Torgerson was in the Legislature.

Membership in that conference operated on a dues basis, with governments contributing 10 cents per resident and business organizations paying a flat $100 fee. Torgerson said the budget in the 1990s was $8,000 to $10,000 a year to cover overhead costs and lobbying trips to Juneau.

How this incarnation is funded will be up to members.

“Every year you vote your dues and ask to be funded,” Torgerson said. “And it changes. It’s sort of a living, breathing document that changes along with the times.”

He anticipates support for the idea.

“I have a feeling it will be well-met with because I think everybody sees the need for a unified voice when we can agree, and when we can’t we need to understand what’s going on in other jurisdictions in the borough. We’re all the borough,” he said.

The Kenai Peninsula Municipal Conference doesn’t preclude individual cities or the borough government from seeking funding for their own projects outside the conference. But where legislative priorities align, they’ll have the support of a group representative of the entire borough, not just one section of it.

Torgerson expects the group will consider alternative energy projects, school funding issues and a lot of roads projects — like a proposed Sterling Highway bypass around Cooper Landing and designating a section of the Sterling Highway as a scenic byway.

“There’s no limit to the issues, except what people want to vote on,” he said.

Even if there isn’t enough support to get a project on the organization’s legislative funding priority list, just having a discussion about it will be valuable, he said.

“A lot of the benefit of this is not only to produce that (priority list), but to get everybody in the same room and figure out how to face problems and address them as neighbors of the borough.”

Gasping for answers — House Judiciary holds hearings to investigate high fuel costs

By Naomi Klouda
Homer Tribune

Where fuel comes from, and how much is paid, is a question the Alaska attorney general’s office and the Alaska Legislature’s House Judiciary Committee is asking, to determine if Alaska consumers are getting a fair price.

Ed Sniffen, senior assistant attorney general, said the outcome of this investigation should supply the public with an explanation about why gas and fuel prices did not go down in Alaska when they tumbled in the states.

“We get calls every day from people saying, ‘I’m getting gouged by these gas prices,’” Sniffen said.

But Alaska doesn’t have a law regulating the profits a company can make, following the free market system in American ideology, he said.

“Yet, there was a little window of time starting in early June and lasting until early September when the prices of fuel seemed supra-competitively high, a bubble way above those levels for no specific reason,” Sniffen said. At no time in Alaska history, tracing the price of fuel back, did prices track that way.

“Every place in the nation was going down and Alaska stayed the same for a long time,” he said.

That’s when the attorney general’s office decided to start investigating the matter, conducting hearings with fuel retailers and wholesalers to figure out what is going on. On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee convened in Anchorage for a second time to hear from the refineries.

“Certainly, we are seeing some weird things that suggest to me something fishy is going on,” Sniffen said.

The House can ask questions of Alaska’s three main petroleum refineries, Petro Star, Tesoro Alaska and FlintHills, but they can’t require them to answer specific cost and price questions because those are protected by confidentiality in a competitive market setting. But the attorney general’s office can subpoena documents, and in turn offers confidentiality, Sniffen said.

He said the judiciary committee has requested documents from Tesoro and information from Crowley and Delta Western, the two shipping companies in Southeastern Alaska that supply fuel.

Smokey Norton, director of marketing for Petro Marine, a fuel distributor on the peninsula, said there are a number of reasons why consumers didn’t see a price dip when the cost of crude dipped to $72 from a long haul of over $100 a barrel.

Right now wholesalers are still holding on to inventory from July when crude remained high.

“If you buy it at $2 a gallon, even though it goes down to $1 a gallon, consumers won’t see that at the pump until they purchase new fuel at the lower price,” she said.

Fishing for an alternative — Salmon task force ponders commercial permit buyout

By Jenny Neyman
Redoubt Reporter

Discussion of a Cook Inlet commercial fishing permit buyback program at a meeting of the Joint Cook Inlet Salmon Task Force last week ranged from the caveat that any such program would have to include voluntary participation from fishermen to speculation on ways to extinguish the fishery — whether fishermen wanted to be bought out or not.

The bipartisan legislative task force met Thursday in Anchorage with Bruce Twomley, commissioner with the Commercial Fishing Entry Commission.

The task force was formed by the Legislature last spring in response to dwindling salmon returns to rivers in the Susitna River drainage. A Cook Inlet commercial fishing permit buyback program was one of the options the task force was charged with considering, under the idea that reducing the number of commercial fishermen in the inlet would allow more salmon to return to rivers in the northern district.

“There are some very frustrated people from some of their experiences,” said Sen. Charlie Huggins, R-Wasilla. “I’m speaking of, in this case, sportfishermen. They’re some of my neighbors and friends.”

That result of a buyback on Northern District salmon runs is not a foregone conclusion, however. Sen. Bill Wielechowski, D-Anchorage, posed the question to Twomley: Would a Cook Inlet permit buyback program increase salmon returns to the Susitna drainage?

“I don’t see how. There isn’t a direct correlation there,” Twomley said. “I mean, the notion of limited entry is it gives managers one variable that they know is under control — they know there’s going to be a certain number of units of gear fishing, and that can help them plan for the fishery.”

It’s the decisions made by in-season fisheries managers that have an impact on salmon returns, not the limited entry commission determining how many permits are in operation, Twomley said.

“We’ve got only limited tools, and our tools give us some limited control over the number of units of gear that can be out there, but all in-season regulations of what those fishermen can do is left to the Board of Fish, and I’m pretty far removed from that,” he said. “So I would not see something we did about the numbers having an immediate effect, because it’s up to people on the other side of that equation.”

Sen. Tom Wagoner, R-Kenai, added that the decisions of in-season fisheries managers are based on meeting in-river escapement goals. Limiting the number of commercial fishermen in the inlet through a buyback program wouldn’t mean more fish get past commercial nets, he said.

“It doesn’t matter if there’s 450 drift permits out there and boats fishing or 300, their overall goal is to harvest enough fish where they meet those escapement goals,” Wagoner said. “And so what you would do with a reduction of the number of permits fishing Cook Inlet, you would increase the production per boat that’s fishing Cook Inlet, even after the reduction of permits.”

The issue of whether a buyback program would be an effective means of increasing salmon runs in the northern district got little more discussion. The task force turned its attention to talk of ways a buyback could be accomplished.

Twomley gave an overview of the drift net and set net commercial salmon fisheries in Cook Inlet. He noted the fisheries have one of the highest levels of participation he’s seen, compared to other fisheries the commission has looked at, with 80 percent or more of the permits being fished. The drift net fishery has 571 permit holders, and grossed an estimated $13 million in the 2007 season. The set net fishery had 738 permit holders and grossed about $10.5 million in 2007. Many of those fishing are Alaskans — 70 percent in the drift net fishery and 82 percent in the set net fishery.

“I found that to be substantial and a respectable figure,” he said.

Attaching a price to those permits for the purpose of a buyback program is difficult to do. Twomley explained that the commission estimates the value of a permit by tracking all permits sold among fishermen and averaging those prices. Currently that figure is $33,300 for a drift net permit at $13,300 for a set net permit. But that doesn’t include all the other investments involved in fishing, including gear, boats and fuel.

“The cost of getting somebody to retire from the fishery could be greater, will likely be greater, than the costs of the figures that I’ve given you,” Twomley said.
The task force chairman, Rep. Craig Johnson, R-Anchorage, noted that the only commercial fisherman who’s testified to the task force on the matter of buybacks estimated he has $1 million wrapped up in the fishery.

“I think it would be somewhat naive of us to think that someone would be rushing in to sell their permit for $33,000,” he said. “I want to caution, if I could, the committee on the value of it. It’s almost a fair market, it’s what you could get for it.”

Twomley said a buyback program runs the risk of going afoul of the state constitution, which, on one hand, stipulates open access to resources, but on another allows a limited-entry fishery with certain provisions. The Limited Entry Act would allow a buyback if its purpose is to create a well-conserved, economically healthy fishery that allows enough participation to protect those who depend on it, he said.

“To be constitutional, a limited-entry system has to impinge on the open-to-entry principle of the constitution as little as possible. If a limited-entry system goes too far and goes over this constitutional line to become too exclusive, unconstitutional … at that point the state has a duty, and under the statute it’s our responsibility, to put more permits back into the water,” Twomley said.

In answering a question from Rep. Bill Stoltze, R-Chugiak/Mat-Su, Twomley said that limited-entry permits are a privilege granted by the state, rather than a guaranteed right. At the same time, he said a buyback program under the Limited Entry Act would have to be voluntary, even if it were a private effort created and financed by fishermen.

Rep. Mike Doogan, D-Anchorage, floated some suggestions he termed as hypothetical that would get around the statutory provision requiring enough permits be available to protect those in the fishery. What if a buyback program was offered and everyone wanted to sell — would that extinguish the fishery, or would the state be obligated to offer more permits?

“If all the fishermen in a fishery elected to sell their permits, that could end the matter. And if the fishery were gone, that doesn’t create a constitutional issue, I don’t think. …,” Twomley said. “If all of the participants did not so elect, it would pretty quickly run into the problem of a fishery that might look too exclusive.”
Twomley said he didn’t think it likely all fishermen would want to sell.

“I have known some of those people, and the last thing they want to do is get out of the business. Their families have been in it for years and years,” he said.
Doogan also wanted to know what leeway the Legislature had in revoking the permits of those who didn’t want to sell.

“I’m not proposing this, I simply want to know whether that is an option by itself or an option in conjunction with buying some of the permits and simply removing the privilege of those who choose not to sell,” Doogan said.

Twomley answered that the Legislature has reserved the power to eliminate or modify permits without compensation.

“We’d have to decide whether we wanted to,” Doogan said. “Apparently we have the authority, and the question would become whether or not the Legislature has the desire to extinguish a fishery all or in part by revoking permits.”

Stoltze hypothesized that banning gillnets in the inlet, either through the Legislature or the public by way of the initiative process, might get around the constitutional challenges of a buyback program.

“By initiative, under a conservation measure, could there be a banning of gillnets? That wouldn’t be restricting the permits, just the means and methods (of fishing),” Stoltze said.

It’s theoretically possible, Twomley said, but the findings showing such a move was in the interest of conservation would have to be sound. He suggested consulting the attorney general for a final determination of the issue.

Stoltze speculated that an initiative seeking to ban gillnets might affect the value of commercial permits to the point where fishermen would want to sell.

“That’s not far-fetched. I’ve had people talk about that and I’ve done my best to ramp down that type of sentiment — for now,” Stoltze said.

He said there’s a lot of pent-up frustration over the situation in the northern district and the lack of resolution to it through the legislative process.

At the conclusion of the discussion, Johnson said he understands the topic is contentious, and left the door open for further exploration of the issue.

“We don’t know how many people would step forward if we were to offer a program in Cook Inlet,” he said. “I certainly don’t think we know the effect of it if we moved down that road.”