Man who threatened troopers gets time served

PALMER — A Caswell-area man convicted over the summer of threatening to kill Alaska State Troopers was set Wednesday morning to be released from prison with a sentence of time served.

Adam Cardwell, 46, was arrested early in the morning of April 12. Calls to trooper dispatchers played at trial had Cardwell threatening to shoot troopers and shoot civilians and run them over on the highway to get a trooper response.

Troopers said Cardwell had been making the threats over the course of a few months but that they only moved in when the threats became specific and credible.

In July, a Palmer jury found Cardwell guilty of six of seven assault counts he was eventually charged with.

Outside court Wednesday, the assistant district attorney who handled the case, Paul Roetman, seemed disappointed. He said he asked Superior Court Judge Kari Kristiansen for an “aggravator,” a legal term used to describe a factor in the crime that can bump the sentence up past the maximum.

“We asked for five years with two suspended,” he said.

Roetman said judge Kristiansen declined, instead imposing a sentence of 56 months with 49 suspended, for a total of seven months to serve. Cardwell has been in jail since he was arrested and though his time behind bars only adds up to about six months, by law, a convict is allowed a one-third reduction in his sentence if he behaves himself while incarcerated. Prison records Thursday showed Cardwell had been released.

Roetman said he didn’t think it was a good idea to let someone like Cardwell out of jail without first getting him some psychological counseling.

Cardwell’s attorney, Greg Parvin, said the sentence was appropriate given that Cardwell was a first-time offender.

“The primary goal of sentencing is rehabilitation especially when you’re 46 years old and you haven’t even had a traffic ticket,” he said.

And previous cases have held that rehabilitation is not a justification for locking somebody up.

As for the aggravating factor — Roetman said it was that the victims in the case were troopers — Parvin said that absolutely the threats were directed at troopers. But the law that outlines that particular aggravator simply didn’t apply to Cardwell’s conduct.

“There has to be an immediacy element to it,” he said.

As in, the threats had to be immediately prior to the arrest. Not, as in Cardwell’s case, calls to dispatchers over the course of months and then a day’s lag between the last threats and Cardwell’s arrest.

Cardwell and his wife, Debbie Cardwell, have for years been trying to bring attention to allegations they’ve made that troopers raped Debbie after she was arrested for drunken driving in 2003.

At trial, Cardwell seemed pleased to have had a chance to voice his allegations in a public setting. But Roetman pointed out that the Cardwells’ allegations surfaced two years after the DUI arrest and started with one trooper but grew over the years to include a half-dozen troopers, a handful of jailers, a magistrate and two district attorneys.

Troopers say they’ve looked into the matter and found absolutely nothing that substantiates anything the Cardwells say.

Cardwell freely admitted at trial to making the threats, but said they were a means to getting attention for his allegations.

Cardwell’s attorney, Greg Parvin, argued at trial that it seemed clear in the conversation that dispatchers were well aware of Cardwell and knew that his threats weren’t credible.

Calling troopers, he argued, was a part of Cardwell’s daily routine, which includes regular calls to a variety of officials — including thrice-daily calls to the public phone number for the President of the United States.

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