PALMER — Think about the crimes committed on the Red Trail of the Alaska State Fairgrounds at fair time — assault, theft and shoplifting are surely common occurrences.

But what about felony DUI?

Between the trails packed with people and the fair’s policy of keeping most vehicles in parking lots outside the grounds, it might not seem likely. But it happened. After two days of trial and an afternoon deliberating, a Palmer jury found Jack Bennett, 30, of Fairbanks, guilty of the crime Wednesday afternoon.

According to Detective Sgt. Kelly Turney with the Palmer Police Department, the case began at 1:58 a.m. on Sept. 3.

“We responded to a disturbance near the National Guard booth,” Turney said. “We were all in the fairgrounds anyway, actually, handling some other business at the time.”

He said he was told when he got to the scene of the disturbance that a dark-colored SUV — which turned out to be a Jeep — was heading up a footpath away from the disturbance.

“I contacted that vehicle on the Red Trail near the Denali Cream Puff booth,” Turney said.

By the time he arrived, Turney said, Bennett was in the passenger seat, but a fair security guard told Turney he’d seen Bennett at the wheel just before the detective arrived. Eventually Bennett was arrested. Since it was his third DUI case, he was charged with a felony.

At trial Tuesday, Palmer police Officer Edward Mooney testified that Bennett blew a .082 on the breathalyzer machine once he was taken back to the station. Alaska law deems .08 to be the limit for blood-alcohol level while driving.

Assistant District Attorney Allison Collins played the jury a tape of an audio recording made while Mooney was testing Bennett’s breath. Bennett spends most of the time railing against the ethics of drunken driving laws, claiming Mooney was trying to fulfill his quota of arrests and accusing him of being in league with corporate interests.

“I didn’t hurt anybody tonight,” Bennett says on the tape. “This is America. This isn’t Baghdad.”

Mooney said very little on the tape, aside from offering Bennett instructions on how to provide a breath sample.

“You really don’t have any compassion for your populace, do you?” Bennett asked, before adding something about Mooney, “making money off of a guy that had two and a half beers.”

It’s a rare thing to get a drunken driving arrest inside the fairgrounds. But arrests at 1 a.m., hours after the fair has shut its gates to customers? Turney said that’s not particularly uncommon.

“All the vendors are still rummaging around, all the carnival ride operators are still walking around,” he said. “There’s actually quite a bit of pedestrian traffic during the course of the night.”

And, he said, police are there most every night too.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.