50 nifty united states4/20/2023 ![]() At the end of the last year, all four men were released from prison. A professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks opened an independent investigation of the case in 2001, and after a long series disputing the outcome of the case appeared in the News Miner, a major newspaper in Alaska's interior, The Alaska Innocence Project intervened. The prosecutorial misconduct in the case is astounding: the police fed lines to witnesses, there was no physical evidence linking the defendants to the murder, and the prosecutor in the case routinely suggested that defense witnesses were lying to protect their fellow Alaska Natives. The facts of the case are documented in remarkable detail on the blog " Free the Fairbanks Four," and The Daily Beast summarized some of the nastier bits. At the time of the Hartman murder there was also “a lot of racial tension” between Fairbanks’s poorer and mostly Native neighborhoods, and the rest of the city, says University of Alaska Fairbanks journalism associate professor Brian O’Donoghue. Don Honea, the ceremonial chief of over 40 villages from interior Alaska, told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in 2008 that “those boys were railroaded,” and he added that Natives feel like they never get a fair shot from cops and courts in Alaska, where the Native population has faced a long history of discrimination. They were released in 2015, after a campaign to prove their innocence, as Newsweek outlined earlier this year: The Fairbanks Four became a major civil rights cause for many in the state. In October of 1997, a White Alaskan named John Hartman was beaten to death outside of a wedding reception. The four young men - who came to be known as "The Fairbanks Four" - were taken into custody for the crime. Schools also remained segregated, with whites attending different schools from natives.įor eighteen years, four Alaska Native men - Eugene Vent, George Frese, Kevin Pease, and Marvin Roberts - were held in those prisons for a murder they did not commit. ![]() Native rights organizations caused general concern among some whites that natives would take over the state politically. Following the grant of US citizenship to native peoples by Congress in 1924, Alaska passed a literacy test law to limit Native voting. Often they were not served by restaurants and movie theaters, or were forced to sit in segregated sections. ![]() Alaska Natives have been the victims, despite being a majority of the population for much of the pre-statehood period. Where Alaska does resemble the rest of the country, though, is in its inequitable disbursal of criminal justice, which has roots in the racist treatment of Native Americans: Unlike the South, there has never been much of a African-American population within, and therefore no real discrimination against them at the governmental level. On the one hand, its rugged terrain and distance from the "lower forty-eight" make it a land ripe for libertarian self-sufficiency on the other hand, the state's reliance on oil revenue to support its citizenry makes it the closest thing the United States has to an intra-country socialist republic. The state seems foreign, as Alaskans refer to the continental United States as the "lower forty-eight," or more simply as "down there in America." The state is unlike any other in the country, as its existence is a healthy blend of contradictions. Alaska gained statehood in 1959, meaning that many living Americans remember its territorial birthright. ![]() The state of Alaska has a unique place in the American imagination.
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