Woman gets 30 months for firing near troopers

PALMER — A Caswell-area woman accused of charges as serious as attempted murder for a March 2011 run-in with Alaska State Troopers received two years and six months in prison Monday in exchange for pleading guilty to assault.

Debbie Cardwell was arrested March 25 outside of her home following a standoff that lasted through the night.

Troopers say she fired shots at them, hitting a marked patrol car.

Whether the shots were fired at troopers was one of the main issues discussed at Monday’s sentencing.

“If I would have shot at him, I’ll say on the record, I would have hit him,” Cardwell told the judge when it was her turn to speak.

She said she was shooting in the air, firing warning shots.

“It was just an accident that it came down and ricocheted and I’m truly sorry for that,” Cardwell said.

Her attorney, Joshua Fannon, told Judge Vanessa White that the trooper investigating the shooting, Trooper Terrence Shanigan, either misinterpreted or fabricated evidence and may have lied about how the whole incident went down.

Fannon pointed to emails he’d received from Shanigan’s ex-wife purporting to show that Shanigan was hoping to sue Cardwell and her husband, Adam Cardwell.

No such lawsuit has been filed, according to court records.

“He thought Debbie was a trust-fund baby,” Fannon said. “He thought it was funny when they shot Mr. Cardwell.”

That last line referred to Cardwell’s then-husband’s arrest for threatening to kill troopers, an incident in which Adam Cardwell was shot with beanbag rounds from trooper shotguns.

“Anybody in the public should be concerned when a day after an incident a trooper, by his own email, discusses his financial interest,” Fannon said.

Assistant District Attorney Shawn Traini told White that he didn’t want to turn the hearing into a character assassination on Shanigan and pointed out that those emails came from a wife who’d been through a wrenching divorce with the trooper.

“Trooper Shanigan is not here to address that and, frankly, divorces are messy,” Traini said.

After the hearing, he said that the district attorney’s office believes anything Fannon said about Shanigan fabricating or misinterpreting evidence was simply not factual.

White, for her part, emphasized that her job on Monday was to decide whether the sentence was a just one.

“I have allowed Mr. Fannon to explain what he felt the evidence would show,” White said, mostly because she knew it was important to Cardwell. But, “It would be inappropriate for me to make any sort of judgment on that.”

She said she felt the sentence was appropriate.

“A sentence of two and a half years is the way the community expresses their concerns about misconduct involving weapons

The Cardwells are well-known characters to troopers because of longstanding allegations that Debbie Cardwell was sexually assaulted after a traffic stop in 2003.

In 2009, Adam Cardwell went to trial and was convicted of threatening to shoot troopers. He’d been upset over his perception that nobody was doing anything about the assault. During his trial, details of his now-ex-wife’s allegations came to light.

Prosecutors said that significant time has been spent investigating the allegations and no evidence found to support the claims. They pointed out that the Cardwells allegations had evolved over time from a rape to a gang-rape to a gang-rape involving many members of the law enforcement community including troopers, prosecutors and judges.

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