Sex abuse conviction stands

PALMER — A man making his way through a 19-year prison sentence for sexually abusing three girls saw his appeal slapped down Friday.

In a ruling issued from the Alaska Court of Appeals, Mark D. Anderson lost on every point of his appeal save one — he shouldn’t have been asked to pay the full price for a state-appointed attorney he only used at the very end of his criminal case.

Anderson had raised five points:

1. His judge improperly kept people out of the courtroom.

2. She also failed to give jurors one of the required instructions.

3. There wasn’t enough evidence he molested one of the girls.

4. His sentence was too severe.

5. He was charged too much for his state-appointed attorney.

So, starting with the first point, appeals court judge David Mannheimer said it’s not clear if what Superior Court Judge Vanessa White did was strictly proper.

In a move to keep people moving in and out of the courtroom from distracting the three girls as they testified, White put a sign on the door saying the hearing was closed, thus keeping more people from coming into the room but allowing the people already there to stay.

“The propriety of the trial judge’s actions might be debatable, but the action was not obviously improper,” Mannheimer wrote.

Which is to say that it wasn’t so clearly wrong as to warrant overturning the case; reasonable judges can disagree whether it was right.

Also, Anderson’s attorney specifically agreed to proceed that way.

Moving on to the second point, White didn’t tell the jury it couldn’t convict Anderson unless they agreed on what specific bad thing he did related to each specific charge.

Mannheimer wrote that Anderson didn’t prove his attorney chose not to object to the lack of an instruction for some tactical reason. The judge also points out that even if this was an error, Anderson has to prove it would have changed the outcome of his trial. And, Mannheimer wrote, he hasn’t. “Under the facts of Anderson’s case, there is no reasonable possibility that the jury’s verdict (was influenced by that).”

As for the third point, Mannheimer wrote that Anderson’s position was that the girl he was accused of abusing couldn’t point to any specific instance of abuse to tie to the charge.

But the girl “testified that Anderson sexually abused her often during his visits to her mother’s house” during the seven months specified in the charges.

Moving on to point four, Mannheimer wrote that the sentencing rules when Anderson went to trial had been increased from where they stood previously in Alaska. And even under those less-stringent sentencing rules people got longer sentences than Anderson did for similar conduct. Also, the sentence could have been much worse. White also found that there was good reason to give Anderson a harsh sentence.

“Judge White found that Anderson was predatory and that his non-threatening, avuncular demeanor made him a particular danger to children,” he wrote.

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