Earlier this year, former Senator Ted Stevens had his conviction reversed after exposing prosecutorial misconduct in his corruption trial. Prosecutors never disclosed during the trial that Bill Allen, the man who became a government witness after allegedly buying influence with Stevens and other Alaska politicians while running Veco Oil, had a sexual relationship with one of the FBI investigators on the case. Now the Anchorage Daily News reports that federal prosecutors also never disclosed that Allen had attempted to cover up and silence witnesses to his sexual relationship with a 15-year-old girl, which would have undermined his credibility. Now other convicted defendants want their cases overturned as well:
Allen’s conduct with that underage girl and at least one other has been the subject of an active Anchorage police investigation since 2008. That inquiry developed more urgency last spring when a prosecutor with the Justice Department’s Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section joined local detectives in the case and began traveling to Anchorage to interview witnesses, including a visit just last week.
But long before the authorities got involved, Allen reportedly went to great lengths to keep his sexual activities secret. When Moore told Allen she expected to be called as a witness at her ex-boyfriend’s trial and forced to reveal Allen’s seamy and possibly criminal private life, Allen immediately sent her, her brother and her fiance on the lam to California to prevent her from being subpoenaed, Moore told an Anchorage police detective and elaborated in recent interviews with the Daily News.
That trip, characterized as a “potential obstruction of justice” when first made public in a federal court filing last month, are among the issues cited by former state House Speaker Pete Kott in his effort to throw out his conviction on corruption charges. Allen was a key witness in Kott’s case, but Kott’s lawyers weren’t told by prosecutors about the California trip, which could have undermined Allen’s credibility under cross-examination by a defense attorney.
Kott’s lawyer has also said Allen’s credibility could have been challenged by other allegations that were known by the government at the time of Kott’s trial but only recently revealed to the defense. Among them: new details about assertions by the underaged girl, Bambi Tyree, now 28, that she lied under oath about her relationship with Allen at Allen’s request, and that Moore was asked by Allen’s attorney to swear that Allen did not have sex with Tyree when she was 15, even though she said she observed it.
The prosecutors are already under investigation for criminal contempt of court from their alleged misconduct during the Stevens trial. If they deliberately kept from the defense the effort by Allen to silence witnesses, they will have participated in suborning perjury and/or witness tampering, which will carry a hefty jail term and the loss of their law licenses. The defense knew about the allegations of underage sex with Allen but were forbidden to raise the issue during the trial because of its irrelevance to the charges and the inflammatory nature of the accusation. But had the defense and the court known about Allen’s attempt to get other witnesses to lie, it would have been directly relevant to his own inclination to tell the truth under oath.
In fact, some may well wonder why Allen wasn’t prosecuted for both the sexual misconduct and the witness tampering himself. When the family went to the US Attorney to file the complaint in 2004, they were under the impression that Allen would get prosecuted for his conduct. Instead, it seems as though prosecutors may have decided to use the girls as pawns in order to pressure Allen into flipping into a government witness for corruption cases.
Allen, for his part, denies the charges, at least of tampering. He claims that the girls tried to extort money from him by threatening to expose the sexual relationships. But the attempts by Allen and his legal team to get them to deny those relationships go directly to the heart of Allen’s own credibility under oath, and should have been disclosed in the discovery process to both the court and the defense. It may have made a great deal of difference in the trial on the judge’s eventual ruling that Allen’s sexual history could not be used by the defense, and it robbed the jury of a relevant piece of information when it came to assessing Allen’s credibility as a witness under oath.
If Alaska’s politics look like a cesspool at times, this prosecution is beginning to look even worse.
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