A rush of chilly air fills the kitchen on a spring day within the Alaska Native village of Kipnuk as a person dusted in frost steps by way of the door.
Justine Paul, age 34, silently mixes himself a glass of lemonade, drops right into a chair and exhales into his lap. Quickly, he retreats to his childhood bed room, the place he stares out the window finding out how briskly the clouds transfer — the way in which he’s all the time sensed a storm earlier than it breaks. A steel baseball bat leans in opposition to the doorframe.
When the Bering Sea wind bullies the home, Paul wonders if police pay attention by way of cracks within the partitions. Waking beneath the Michael Jordan posters in his room, he typically fears he’s dreaming. That his physique would possibly nonetheless be 100 miles away, throughout the tundra in a 7.5-by-9-foot jail cell.
Paul spent seven years in jail ready to be tried on a homicide cost constructed on unhealthy proof. The central clues that prosecutors relied on to attach him to the homicide crumbled as quickly as anybody checked. But it surely took dozens of delays, agreed to by a revolving solid of attorneys, earlier than the state lastly dropped the case in 2022, releasing Paul. Aside from one month on pretrial launch, he’d been behind bars for two,600 days.
In a state courtroom system that enables delay after delay earlier than the accused goes on trial, Paul’s case is a reminder of why speedy trial rights exist within the first place: to stop defendants from paying the worth when police or prosecutors make errors. It is without doubt one of the most damning examples of Alaska’s slow-motion justice system, which takes greater than twice as lengthy to resolve probably the most severe felonies because it did a decade in the past.
The workings of Alaska’s justice system have an outsize affect on Alaska Natives like Paul, who’re 18% of the state’s residents however 40% of individuals arrested. In recent times, they’ve edged out white Alaskans as the biggest group held in state jails and prisons.
Time misplaced whereas Paul was locked up and within the years since have left the homicide sufferer’s household ready for somebody to face a jury so the reality may be identified.
State police solely this yr reopened the investigation into who fatally stabbed Eunice Whitman, Paul’s girlfriend. Her sister Heather Whitman mentioned she was shocked when a reporter informed her that troopers are actively working the case as soon as once more.
Whitman was unaware of the explanations cited for dismissing Paul’s case and mentioned she nonetheless assumes he’s responsible. The absence of penalties for anybody in her sister’s demise has left the household bitter.
An lawyer who helped to in the end get Paul’s costs dropped mentioned the case is the primary that involves thoughts when folks ask how attorneys can signify these accused of violent crimes. Past the truth that everyone deserves protection, some defendants could also be really harmless.
“These are those which might be tremendous anxious,” mentioned protection lawyer Windy Hannaman. “To suppose that should you mess up, this man that you simply suppose is harmless may go to jail for a very very long time.”
After which there’s the crime itself: the 2015 stabbing of a joyous 23-year-old Alaska Native girl in a public place, left unsolved after the state swiftly indicted Paul on simply disproven proof. Somebody is getting away together with her homicide, and the possibility to carry them accountable slips additional away yr after wasted yr.
A Killing Like No Different
A forty five-minute flight by Cessna from Paul’s hometown, the town of Bethel hugs a curve of the decrease Kuskokwim River. Unreachable from most of Alaska by automobile, it’s residence to about 6,000 folks, most of them Yup’ik. Tundra stretches to the horizon in all instructions. On the city’s middle, between a comfort retailer and a baseball diamond often known as Pinky’s Park, tilted wood boardwalks lace a number of acres of wetland.
Bethel Police investigator Amy Davis slowly walked these trails on Might 24, 2015, aiming her flashlight into the 5 a.m. gloom. What she knew thus far: 4 boys searching for a spot to smoke pot had discovered a girl’s physique right here in a sunken patch of floor often known as “the pit.” Davis arrived an hour after they referred to as the police.
Ponytailed and in her mid-30s, Davis made word of sodden cigarette butts among the many low cottonwood bushes and the shoe prints stamped in mud and grass. She stumbled on the physique a number of yards away.
Though carrying the darkish blue patrol uniform of her colleagues, Davis was the Bethel Police Division’s sole detective. After 5 years in a area with the best homicide fee in Alaska, in a state the place extra girls are murdered by males per capita than anyplace else in america, Davis had by no means seen a killing like this.
A darkish pool of blood soaked the grass, suggesting the sufferer had been stabbed in a single location, the place many of the blood loss occurred, and dragged 10 toes away. The sufferer’s garments, additionally bloody, lay stacked in a neat pile. The killer lingered right here after the act, risking discovery.
A health worker later concluded the girl had been stabbed 31 instances, within the abdomen, the groin and the neck. A former Bethel prosecutor who turned Paul’s protection lawyer, Marcy McDannel, mentioned the killing is among the many most horrific she’s encountered in nearly 30 years of practising legislation in Alaska.
“You solely see this kind of scene in a serial killer sort of case, and these are — regardless of what true crime media would have you ever imagine — exceedingly uncommon,” she mentioned.
After a number of hours, Davis had no homicide weapon, no identify for the sufferer and no leads. That modified when a police dispatcher took a name from a younger man who mentioned he’d been frantically trying to find his girlfriend.
It was Paul. He’d heard a physique had been discovered by Pinky’s Park. Was it Eunice Whitman?
Davis met with Paul on the police station. In a police video of the interview, the investigator didn’t speak about who died however as an alternative requested a collection of questions on his relationship with Whitman, the place and time he final noticed her and his actions afterward. After two or three hours he informed police he was drained and wished to go residence. Davis let him sleep in a holding cell.
Within the meantime, the detective obtained a search warrant for the house of a relative with whom Paul was staying in Bethel. Davis wrote that police observed cuts on Paul’s cheek and hand — proof images present a laceration on his finger the dimensions of a paper lower — and what she mentioned gave the impression to be a drop of blood on his shoe. She added {that a} witness had referred to as the station saying he’d seen a person and girl arguing on the boardwalk hours earlier than the killing.
Seven hours into Paul’s time on the station, officers had one thing. Inside the home the place he was staying was a small black backpack crammed with objects together with a pair of Previous Navy denims and a tie-dyed T-shirt.
That they had blood on them.
Davis returned to the interview room armed with this new info. An investigator with the Alaska State Troopers, Austin MacDonald, entered together with her. Now, lastly, MacDonald knowledgeable Paul that Whitman, the girl Paul mentioned he meant to marry, was useless. Paul put his head down in his arms and stored it there. After a short while, he let loose a wail.
Coolly asking Paul to gather himself, MacDonald leaned in. The questions sharpened. Did Paul know the place Whitman died? How she died? Paul mentioned he’d heard that the physique was discovered on the pit by Pinky’s Park. He mentioned that police informed him she was stabbed within the throat.
“So what, do you guys suppose I’ve finished it?” he requested.
“No, we don’t suppose that you simply did it, Justine, OK?” mentioned the trooper. “We already know that you simply did it.”
MacDonald, like different troopers within the case, didn’t reply when requested to touch upon an in depth description of their actions.
Paul informed them that they had it incorrect. He beloved his girlfriend and wouldn’t do what was finished to her.
He requested for a lawyer and positioned his brow on the desk, saying he was finished speaking. MacDonald informed him investigators would cease asking about what occurred. The trooper as an alternative ready to serve a brand new search warrant, this time on Paul himself.
After a quick silence, MacDonald added, “Oh, and simply so you already know, I need you to know that we discovered your bloody garments.”
Paul lifted his brow simply barely off the desk. “What bloody garments?” he mentioned. “What are you speaking about?”
A Backpack of Bloody Garments
Paul and Eunice Whitman had been collectively for 5 months when she died.
Whitman was 23. Yup’ik like Paul, she had full cheeks, lengthy lashes like her sisters and daughters, and lengthy darkish hair and bangs. Paul was 24, a skinny, clean-shaven man with tattoos, glasses and a behavior of joking to fill silences.
Life within the city of Bethel, the place Whitman grew up, and the neighboring village of Kipnuk, the place Paul did, revolves round moose hunts and the yearly arrival of salmon in large, inexperienced rivers. The couple had identified one another since they had been youngsters, when Whitman visited Kipnuk to compete within the Native Youth Olympics, however solely began courting in January 2015.
As their relationship grew extra severe and speak turned to marriage, Whitman returned to the village to satisfy Paul’s mom, Joann Paul Carl. Whitman introduced a jar of decaf espresso that she utilized in a broth for musk ox stew, a recipe Joann had by no means tried. Justine Paul — everybody pronounces it “Justin” — appeared comfortable, which his mom says she didn’t take as a right.
One motive Davis mentioned she centered on Paul as a suspect in Whitman’s homicide was his felony file. At age 16, he was charged with tried sexual assault involving a 9-year-old boy. Paul pleaded responsible, courtroom data present, making him a registered intercourse offender whereas nonetheless a minor.
Folks talked overtly about Paul’s file in Whitman’s presence, in line with interviews carried out by police. However Whitman, who fled a violent relationship together with her prior boyfriend, in line with restraining orders she filed in Bethel courtroom, informed associates Paul would by no means damage her.
On the night time of the homicide, a video on Paul’s telephone timestamped 12:11 a.m. confirmed Whitman on the boardwalk arguing with the individual behind the digital camera, a report by state troopers says. Paul informed police the couple went in numerous instructions at 1 or 2 a.m. A dispatcher took the decision a few physique at 4 that morning.
Paul spent the time in between wandering round and searching for Whitman, he informed the Anchorage Each day Information and ProPublica. His textual content messages confirmed him arranging to meetup with associates and searching for a spot to sleep, troopers wrote. He went to mattress at 7 a.m. at his aunt’s home and woke up later within the day to be taught Whitman’s household had been looking for her, he mentioned.
As Paul sat in a jail cell in the course of the days after Whitman’s demise, prosecutors set to work getting ready to seem earlier than a grand jury. They heard from a pal of Whitman’s that she’d had a latest miscarriage. The pal informed police Paul blamed it on Whitman’s ingesting. The state’s narrative: Paul killed Whitman out of anger over dropping the child.
A transcript of the grand jury continuing reveals prosecutor Mike Grey delivering a grisly account. The crime had been particularly bloody as a result of, in line with the health worker, the killer had lower arteries in Whitman’s groin and neck. Clothes later present in a backpack belonging to the sufferer’s boyfriend, in the meantime, was stained with blood.
Grey informed jurors that below questioning by police, Paul had revealed “damning” information of Whitman’s neck wound. The prosecutor additionally mentioned a shoe print close to her physique was a minimum of per the tread on Paul’s sneakers.
However Grey mentioned {that a} pending DNA take a look at on Paul’s bloody clothes — wanted to confirm whether or not the blood was the sufferer’s — can be “the actual determinant of this case.”
The grand jury shortly handed up an indictment. Paul was to face trial for first-degree homicide, with a most sentence of 99 years in jail.
There was only one drawback. The blood, the state’s crime lab discovered, was not what it appeared.
Technicians examined a stain from Paul’s Previous Navy denims and concluded it contained blood from a person, relatively than from Whitman because the prosecution had recommended. Extra particularly, the lab mentioned it was per Paul’s DNA.
A day or two earlier than Whitman died — accounts differ on the timing — Paul had fought a person in entrance of a number of witnesses. Paul informed the newsrooms that the struggle left him with a bloody nostril and that he stuffed his stained T-shirt and denims into his backpack afterward.
When Paul’s bloody denims did not match the sufferer’s DNA, Davis requested the lab to check extra of Paul’s bloody clothes. Emails present that crime lab officers resisted, saying the lab couldn’t take a look at each merchandise in each case it labored on. However Davis stored at it.
Months later, the lab examined Paul’s Southpole-brand tie-dyed T-shirt and once more discovered no proof of Whitman’s blood. The stains had a lot male DNA that the lab concluded no feminine DNA was more likely to present up with a better look.
Davis, in two latest interviews and by e mail, mentioned she continues to imagine Paul dedicated the homicide. She cited circumstantial proof and mentioned the DNA testing didn’t go far sufficient.
Among the many different clothes in Paul’s backpack had been a tank prime and boxers, which weren’t on the record of things lab data say had been examined, regardless that police described them as bloodstained. One other two objects are listed as having “switch” stains, that means they appeared to have absorbed blood from different clothes. Davis mentioned her boss informed her hiring a non-public lab to check extra objects would price the town an excessive amount of.
“If we’re being sincere, the lab factor was a significant failure in my eyes,” Davis mentioned.
(The Division of Public Security, which runs the crime lab, mentioned in an announcement that technicians “left no viable forensic stone unturned” within the Whitman case.)
Data present the state lab dominated out the blood being Whitman’s on Might 9, 2016, rather less than a yr after Paul’s arrest. The state’s hoped-for proof, the central pillar of the prosecution’s case — that Paul stabbed Whitman, who then bled profusely on his garments — had simply fallen aside.
But it will take one other six years for Paul to go free.
Six Extra Years
Alaska’s justice system is meant to maneuver much more quickly. The state structure says crime victims have a proper to the “well timed disposition” of a case. Additional, Alaska interprets the defendant’s proper to “speedy and public trial” below the U.S. Structure to imply folks ought to face a choose or jury inside 120 days of being charged.
However the time to resolve probably the most severe Alaska felonies as of 2025 was greater than three years, and a few just lately resolved instances took 10. Victims have lengthy described the ache that the anticipate justice can inflict. ProPublica and the Anchorage Each day Information this yr discovered two sexual assault instances that took so a few years to resolve, the victims died. One other case had been delayed greater than 70 instances.
For defendants, the sluggish stroll to a courtroom carries a distinct value. Analysis reveals lengthy pretrial delays upend households, improve trauma and make responsible pleas extra doubtless even for individuals who keep their innocence — as a result of they need an finish to the uncertainty.
Prosecutors, protection attorneys and judges are all implicated within the torpor of Alaska’s courtrooms.
Critics have described a tradition of delay: every week right here, two months there. An lawyer is likely to be newly assigned, backlogged with different instances or down with the flu. One facet says, “We’d like extra time,” the opposite agrees, and the choose suspends the 120-day speedy trial countdown.
Quickly the record of postponements, each seemingly affordable, has grown to dozens.
These delays turned an open secret amongst Alaska courtroom observers. The state Workplace of Victims’ Rights has warned of extreme pretrial delays yearly since 2014. The pandemic solely made the issue worse. Whereas most states halted trials for eight to 12 months, Alaska’s pause lasted two years.
Courtroom officers have ordered new limits on delays to deal with the issue, and courtroom information reveals the time it takes to resolve misdemeanors and low-level felonies has dropped. However case durations stay stubbornly lengthy for high-level felonies.
In Paul’s case, the preliminary court-appointed lawyer had expressed impatience in the course of the yr after Paul’s arrest as prosecutors stored requesting delays to check his bloody garments.
William Montgomery, a former school baseball participant who moved to Alaska after legislation faculty, was in his second yr on the job with the Workplace of Public Advocacy when he took Paul’s case. He had agreed to the postponements. In Might 2016, apparently exasperated, he informed Decide Nathaniel Peters that prosecutors couldn’t “simply proceed this out endlessly.”
Ultimately everybody acquired the most recent lab outcomes, which once more confirmed that the primary proof used to cost Paul got here up quick.
The state should have ended the case proper then, two Alaska protection attorneys unconnected to the case informed the newsrooms. Prosecutors offered different police findings to the grand jury, however that they had so firmly emphasised the bloody clothes that they need to have dropped the indictment when this proof collapsed. Or they may have requested grand jurors in the event that they’d re-charge Paul with out it.
It’s unclear why the lead prosecutor, Grey, stood quick. He retired in 2017 and died in a bike accident days later. Different prosecutors straight concerned within the case and their supervisors within the state Division of Legislation didn’t reply to detailed questions.
The Legislation Division offered an announcement saying that as a result of Whitman’s murder stays an open investigation, the division wouldn’t “speculate, affirm, or deny investigative theories, suspects, or evidentiary assessments past what is accessible within the public file.”
And so the case dragged on. Prosecutors proceeded with what was left of their case.
A number of months later, with the attorneys considering a November 2016 trial, Montgomery requested to look at one other piece of bodily proof famous at Paul’s indictment: the crime scene shoe print that police mentioned regarded much like Paul’s Nike sneakers. An skilled witness for Montgomery gave him a solution in July 2017. The 2 prints that had been clear sufficient for him to reliably study didn’t match Paul’s, the skilled wrote.
Montgomery now had a robust argument for the jury that each the blood and the shoe proof had been defective.
However relatively than transfer to trial, Montgomery requested for a brand new delay — to check extra proof. Montgomery was nonetheless figuring out the logistics 10 months later when he was appointed to be a state choose.
Montgomery declined to talk with the Each day Information and ProPublica. His spouse, Winter, an lawyer who assisted in Paul’s protection, mentioned in an e mail that having consultants consider proof for the protection “takes money and time” and may add to delays. Nevertheless, she mentioned, it’s a matter of “making one of the best protection attainable.”
All through the method, attorneys for the 2 sides gathered each few months for 10-minute hearings and located extra causes to not maintain a trial, courtroom minutes present. Protection and prosecution pulled out their calendars and knocked dates off the desk. One other trial was in the way in which. Too near moose looking season to get jurors. When ought to we meet once more?
Paul listened in from jail by telephone or video earlier than returning to his cell.
He voiced confusion at what was occurring. He wrote the choose a word at one level asking to see the proof in opposition to him. A clerk wrote him again, saying the choose wasn’t allowed to reply. It was 4 years after his indictment, three because the blood proof had been discovered missing, two since Montgomery’s skilled had undercut the shoe proof.
He says that he handed the years studying: possibly half the jailhouse library. The Mortal Devices younger grownup fantasy collection turned a favourite.
All informed, Peters, the choose, granted 26 delays between Paul’s arrest in 2015 and his launch in August 2022. Judges who stuffed in for Peters granted 5 extra delays. (Peters declined an interview request by way of a spokesperson, who mentioned judges can not talk about their decision-making past the courtroom file.)
As an extra indicator of how drawn out the proceedings turned, eight state-appointed protection attorneys and 11 prosecutors got here and went over time.
“It’s only a loopy, loopy period of time to be pretrial, no matter whether or not you’re responsible or harmless,” mentioned Jacqueline Shepherd, an lawyer monitoring trial delays for the ACLU of Alaska, after analyzing key paperwork in Paul’s case. “That uncertainty and unknown is its personal type of torture for an individual.”
Case Dismissed
New momentum in Paul’s case began to construct in late 2018, three years after his arrest, when he landed a brand new protection lawyer.
As a prosecutor, Marcy McDannel was often known as “Most Marcy” for her tenacious efforts to place defendants behind bars so long as attainable. She’d switched sides and now labored for the Workplace of Public Advocacy. When Paul’s lawyer was appointed as a choose, his protection crew requested McDannel to take the case.
Along with her bullhorn voice and penchant for profanity, McDannel struck concern in opposing attorneys. She had labored in Bethel as a younger prosecutor, strolling her black Lab, Lou, on the boardwalk the place Whitman’s physique was discovered. She knew the landmarks surrounding the crime scene and the gamers within the native police division.
McDannel reviewed Paul’s file, sizing up the failings within the prosecution’s case. She couldn’t perceive why prosecutors had caught by the costs. She additionally couldn’t see why her predecessors had taken a lot time to deliver Paul’s case to trial and win.
The crime lab had lengthy since discovered the blood on Paul’s garments was not the sufferer’s. An skilled witness had informed the protection crew the shoe prints from the crime scene didn’t match Paul’s. (The state’s personal evaluation would later attain the identical conclusion.)
McDannel was filled with confidence. Whereas the overwhelming majority of felony instances finish in plea offers, not jury trials, McDannel agreed together with her predecessors’ evaluation that Paul may win a full acquittal. Not like her predecessors, McDannel felt, she had the expertise to do it shortly.
“There was so little proof,” McDannel mentioned. “I promised myself and Justine we’d get it to trial in six months.”
She acknowledges now that purpose mirrored her need relatively than a sensible appraisal. A jury trial was set for Oct. 28, 2019, or 13 months after she took the case.
Then, three weeks earlier than trial, the prosecution requested for extra time. McDannel had produced a last-minute skilled witness. In flip, the prosecution shocked McDannel with a whole lot of pages of latest proof. It didn’t find yourself exhibiting a lot, however it required overview.
One other spherical of scheduling discussions and pretrial motions started. The pandemic struck a number of months later, in March 2020.
With courts now closed and trials on maintain, McDannel used the solitude to chip away on the state’s remaining circumstantial case in opposition to Paul. Though he hadn’t confessed to something, she tried to exclude his assertion to police. When that failed, she discovered an skilled within the Yup’ik language to interpret Paul’s demeanor in the course of the interrogation.
However because the pandemic wore on, it turned clear to everybody that life was not returning to regular quickly. McDannel felt she’d proven prosecutors that they had completely no likelihood of prevailing, but they’d refused to fold. It was time to place Paul’s wait to an finish.
On Might 12, 2022, a protection lawyer named Windy Hannaman filed the movement to dismiss. Hannaman took up Paul’s trigger as a result of McDannel, like so many others concerned within the case, had switched jobs. However McDannel had already drafted the dismissal movement for her successor earlier than she left. The second appeared proper. The state, too, had simply put a brand new prosecutor on the case.
The 37-page protection movement argued that the proof the lead investigator gave the grand jury, “nearly with out exception,” had fallen quick in the long run. “Not solely has the proof did not implicate Paul,” Hannaman’s submitting mentioned, “a lot of it turned out to be exculpatory.”
The doc recounted how the blood work and the shoe prints did not match when examined. It additionally solid doubt on the remaining declare police made to the grand jury: that Paul had incriminated himself by saying Whitman was stabbed within the neck. This appeared one thing that solely the killer may know, and Paul had mentioned he heard it from police.
Hannaman described why she thought prosecutors would have a tough time proving Paul was mendacity: Police didn’t have video overlaying all of Paul’s time on the station, and it wasn’t clear if officers had been requested to not speak to him. (Davis informed the Each day Information and ProPublica that nobody there apart from her and the state trooper who was investigating talked to Paul concerning the case.)
In a response a month after the movement was filed, prosecutor Jenna Gruenstein mentioned the proof offered to the grand jurors was grounded in info out there on the time and there was nothing improper about it. She additionally argued that bodily proof didn’t totally clear Paul, noting that blood on Whitman’s denims was examined and was discovered to be per Paul’s.
However she conceded that if the state had identified concerning the detrimental blood and shoe outcomes initially, it will have been obliged to share that info. In its assertion to the newsrooms, the Division of Legislation summed up Gruenstein’s response as saying “dismissal of the indictment was warranted, primarily based on info developed after the preliminary indictment.”
A Bethel Superior Courtroom choose dismissed all costs on Aug. 9, 2022.
Paul had spent a complete of seven years and 43 days in jail.
He was 24 on the day of his arrest and 31 when he was freed.
The fee to Alaska taxpayers to jail him all that point solely to drop the costs: an estimated $550,000.
Life Outdoors
On an April day in Kipnuk, a latest blizzard had deepened the spring snow. A white fog hid the ocean because the sound of basketballs clanging off a netless rim echoed down the water. Pleasant village canines, wiggling on method, met each aircraft, and flat Starlink web antennae topped homes like commencement caps.
Justine Paul and his mom, Joann, had been dwelling within the household’s pink home. The close by schoolhouse is called after her late grandfather, a tribal chief. {A photograph} of her father enjoying honky-tonk guitar hangs on the wall. Joann stored a stack of his data. He was blind, and the songs have names like “My Cane, My Slippers and You.”
“Each time I really feel low, I take heed to him,” Joann mentioned. She thumbed by way of the file assortment. Her son has the identical Yup’ik identify as his musician grandfather, she mentioned: Teggitgaq.
In Justine Paul’s room, a brand new Fb message arrived: “Killer.”
Whitman’s sister, Paul defined to a reporter.
Till this text, the one information tales about Whitman’s case out there on-line repeated the main points police used at his indictment in 2015 — the shoe prints, the bloody backpack. When prosecutors deserted the costs in opposition to him in 2022, nobody wrote about it.
After getting out of jail, Paul mentioned, he lived on the streets of Anchorage and almost overdosed 10 instances on fentanyl. He mentioned that on two or three of those events, he informed associates he didn’t need them to revive him with the opioid antidote naloxone. He was seeking to die. “I sort of gave up slightly bit, slowly.”
McDannel, the protection lawyer, mentioned she anxious after his launch.
“I spent the primary couple of months after he acquired out chasing him across the state as a result of he was having psychotic breaks,” McDannel mentioned. “They took seven and a half years of his life, and I believe it broke him.”
In October, the storm that Paul as soon as watched for out his window in Kipnuk lastly rolled in.
Winds from Hurricane Halong gusted 100 mph alongside the coast, driving the ocean into the streets of the village. Helicopters rescued Paul and his mom. He ended up dwelling in a village 140 miles away. She resettled in Anchorage; the pink home in Kipnuk sits empty, nonetheless filled with images.
Even now Paul fears that he is likely to be charged with Whitman’s homicide as soon as extra.
It’s unclear how actual that risk is likely to be. McDannel maintains he can’t be charged once more as a result of Alaska’s speedy trial clock ran out. However the state Division of Legislation mentioned such selections in the end are made by a courtroom and rely on the details of every case.
The division additionally emphasised {that a} dismissal solely displays the prosecution’s incapacity to show guilt past affordable doubt — “not an affirmative declaration of a defendant’s factual innocence.”
Whitman’s household and Davis, the police investigator, want to see him charged once more. “He was all the time the prime suspect,” Davis mentioned by e mail.
But there stay different attainable avenues of inquiry.
Police and prosecutors did not deeply pursue different theories of the crime in the course of the 11 days that handed between Whitman’s demise and Paul’s indictment, investigative data present. As an example, had they widened their investigation, they may have observed one thing unusual.
One other younger girl was killed simply months earlier in a neighboring neighborhood. Murdered in a virtually equivalent method, stabbed a number of instances and displayed nude on the tundra for all to see.
Editor’s word: We obtained courtroom data from bodily recordsdata in Bethel, Alaska, and compiled in depth audio of hearings by way of file requests with the state courtroom system. Justine Paul’s former lawyer additionally offered materials uncovered by police and shared with the protection, together with a transcript of grand jury proceedings and video of Paul’s questioning by police. As a result of describing each piece of data police gathered can be impractical, this story focuses primarily on proof highlighted prominently at Paul’s indictment. We used a number of channels to attempt to attain each individual the story mentions, notably members of Eunice Whitman’s household. Heather Whitman, her sister, in the end sat for an interview.
