Serial drunk driver loses his appeal

MAT-SU - A state appeals court has ruled that a Palmer man was not mistreated when a judge assigned him a stiffer penalty for his sixth drunken driving offense than he received for his seventh.

Robert J. Chilligan was arrested in 2008 after he took a borrowed car on a police chase down the Glenn Highway before hitting a tree off the Eklutna exit. He had a blood alcohol content of .132. The legal limit for driving is .08.

"In September 2008, while he was on pretrial release, Chilligan committed another set of felony driving offenses near Wasilla. He entered into a plea agreement and received concurrent sentences of four years' imprisonment with two years suspended," wrote appeals court judge Joel Bolger in a ruling handed down Friday.

In the Glenn Highway chase, though, Chilligan was sentenced to eight years in jail with three-and-a-half suspended and four-and-a-half to serve.

The cases were so similar, Chilligan argued, that it was unfair for the Anchorage judge to have imposed two-and-a-half more years of prison time. He argued that Anchorage Superior Court Judge David Stewart didn't take the Wasilla case into account.

But Stewart reviewed the Wasilla case and even mentioned it when handing down Chilligan's sentence. Bolger wrote that the appeals court had "no question" that Stewart took the case into account.

"Chilligan's argument suggests that we should reverse the sentence in this case because it was not the same as the sentence for the Wasilla offenses. We reject this suggestion," Bolger wrote.

He said Stewart had plenty of reasons for imposing a harsher sentence.

"For one thing, the record suggests that Chilligan had stolen the car he wrecked in this case, a circumstance that was not present in the Wasilla offenses," Bolger wrote.

Also, it would seem appropriate to impose a harsher sentence on someone who behaved so poorly on pretrial release as to pick up yet another drunken driving conviction.

"Chilligan also argues that the judge failed to consider his prospects for rehabilitation. But Chilligan's prospects for rehabilitation are not bright. At the time of this offense, he had at least four prior convictions for DUI and two prior convictions for eluding a police officer," Bolger wrote, though a case-by-case accounting of Chilligan's prior DUI offenses earlier in the ruling notes five convictions prior to Chilligan's Eklutna arrest.