Time served for man who threatened troopers

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 run over people on the highway to get a trooper response.

Outside of 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.

See more of this story in Friday’s Frontiersman.