Tom Anderson Sentencing - Five Years

Tom Anderson was sentenced to five years in prison today, but a lot more happened in court this morning than that. I'm still sorting through it all. When I wrote my first post on the Anderson trial I said there might be problems because I knew Tom. He'd been my student. In the field of public administration. He'd had ethics in some of my classes. But because of this I couldn't say things that I'd learned in our student-teacher relationship. So I've only written stuff here that has come from other sources - mainly the trial.

It's been difficult acting here in two different roles - one as an amateur journalist, the other as the observer of my former student. It became clear early on that he was guilty and given that, I wondered why did he insist on going to trial? Why didn't he work out a deal like the others? We even learned that he had worn a wire for a while, but not what happened.

Today we got some answers to those questions.


He'd been offered a deaL Basically:
1. He had to plead guilty to one felony charge.
2. There were no guarantees on penalties.
3. He had to do what the government told him to do.

Through testimony from two attorneys who preceded Stockler as Anderson's attorney - Jeff Feldman and Craig Howard - we learned about the deal and the conditions (listed above.) Several things were happening in his life.
1. His girlfriend - and now wife - was pregnant and they wanted to get married.
2. The legislative session was going to begin and the government wanted him to wear a wire in Juneau.

He was getting very stressed working for the FBI. Secretly taping others was uncomfortable. He had been allowed to tell his father (former head of the state troopers) what he was doing but it was difficult lying to his fiance about where he was going all the time. Feldman said that in the summer of 2005, Tom's only job was working (without pay, of course) for the government. The government wanted him to go to Juneau for the session and continue taping people. Feldman said that Tom felt his job as representative was to do the legislative work of his constituents and he couldn't do that if he were working full time as an undercover agent.

You can be skeptical of some of that, particularly in light of his working for what he thought was Cornell instead of his constituents. Yet I think that humans have an ability to delude themselves into believing that what they are doing is ok. I don't think it is far fetched that Tom really did believe that since he agreed ideologically with what he was being asked to do, that it was really ok. Obviously he knew it didn't look good - or they wouldn't have had to launder the payments. As his teacher, these are the points that are haunting me. It wasn't pleasant seeing him sentenced even though it was the correct thing to do.

That doesn't excuse it - as he acknowledged today - but it may help explain it. His choice was to take a single felony - and his first two attorneys said when they saw the tapes they knew he was in trouble - or risk being convicted of what turned out to be seven felonies. He let the first attorney go. It wasn't clear why Feldman did not continue to represent Anderson. The ADN in December 2006 reported Feldman said there was a conflict in schedules. In any case, it appears that Craig Howard was let go because of the requirement to accept one felony. It's not clear what happened with Feldman. Feldman said, not only was the agreement the investigators wanted Anderson to sign unique among the many he'd seen, he also had never seen a client turn down the chance to reduce the charges like this.

Paul Stockler, was a gentler, kinder version of the attorney we saw at the trial. He'd learned a lot from this trial he said. He tried to strike a balance between admitting that Anderson had been guilty of serious crimes and deserved to be punished and advocating for leniency in the sentencing.

Thanks to the Alaska Public Radio Network, who posted the court recording on their website, below is Tom Anderson's statement to the court. You can judge it for yourself.

Tom Anderson's Statement to the Court imported by AKRaven

There's lots more to write about, but I'm trying to sort it out. As you can see from this post, I've got a ways to go.