Court denies Kohring again

ANCHORAGE — It’s looked this way before, but if he finally takes “no” for an answer, Vic Kohring’s criminal case is at an end.

Kohring, a former seven-term term legislator from Wasilla who resigned his seat in the state House of Representatives in 2007 to focus on his legal defense when he got caught up in the corruption investigation that eventually ensnared the late Sen. Ted Stevens, is currently running for a seat on the Wasilla City Council.

His corruption case went to trial where he was convicted, but that conviction was thrown out on the same grounds that Stevens was exonerated — prosecutors had withheld evidence. Unlike Stevens, though, Kohring was charged again with the same crimes and eventually pleaded guilty in October 2011.

Back in April, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit declined a request Kohring made to have that plea and conviction thrown out due to new information about prosecutorial misconduct, namely prosecutor Hank Schuelke’s report about the case that was made public in March 2012. Kohring said the report shows fraudulent claims were made to the appeals court.

Two judges on the appeals court swatted down his request.

“We agree with Kohring that the representations made by the government to this court, upon which he bases his fraud claim were ‘cryptic.’ However, it is far from clear that they were fraudulent,” the court ruled.

After that ruling, all of Kohring’s publicly appointed attorneys dropped out, essentially indicating the case had been concluded. Kohring, however, filed a 19-page motion with the court on his own behalf asking to have the entire appeals court hear his case yet again.

In public forums, Kohring has said before that the misconduct in his case was worse than that in Stevens’ case. He relies in the filing heavily on Schulke’s report.

“The results did not become public until March 2012, five months after Kohring’s October 2011 plea agreement. If he had them at the time, Kohring would not have entered a guilty plea,” Kohring writes, using the third-person vernacular customary for legal filings.

The evidence he points to mostly revolves around Bill Allen, the head of now-defunct oilfield services company VECO, who was the star witness in all of the corruption prosecutions and who was seen on a videotape handing Kohring a wad of cash in a Juneau hotel room.

The charges Kohring pleaded guilty to related to a different bribe in a restaurant.

The court was not convinced to hear Kohring’s case again. They denied his appeal relatively succinctly using the term “en banc,” which denotes a hearing before the full court rather than just two judges:

“The full court has been advised of the petition for rehearing en banc, and no judge of the court has requested a vote on the petition for rehearing en banc. The petition for rehearing is denied,” the court’s order reads in full.

The former state lawmaker has expressed an interest in serving in local politics again, and is a candidate for Wasilla City Council on the Oct. 1 ballot.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270

or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.