ADN Reports Bill Allen Sex Case Dropped by Feds

Cliff Groh at Alaska Political Corruption  notes that Richard Mauer has a long article this afternoon reporting that the Feds have dropped the sex case against Bill Allen.  

This is a longstanding investigation by the feds and Anchorage Police Department of Allen's relationships with underage girls that first came out (if I recall right) during the political corruption trials in 2007.  There have been questions about whether dropping this case was one of the reasons that Allen agreed to be a witness for the prosecution so quickly.  Although the Anchorage Police say that the case was strong, no reason was given by the feds for dropping it. 

The trial attorney, Barak Cohen, CEOS section chief Drew Oosterbaan, and criminal division head Lanny Breuer all referred requests for comment to a department spokeswoman, Laura Sweeney. Sweeney said department policy prevented her and the officials from discussing the reasons for not prosecuting a given case.

"We understand that not everyone will agree with every prosecutorial decision we make but we must continue to assess each matter based on the specific facts, circumstances, evidence and the law," Sweeney said in a prepared statement. "Our trial attorneys, section chiefs and division leadership evaluate these factors and make the decision determined to be the most appropriate given the totality of information before them."

You can read the whole article here.  Below is the end of the article.  Roberds is one of the girls reported to have been involved. 

"They told me that the case as [sic] denied -- they decided not to prosecute Bill Allen," Roberds said. "They were saying they were pretty upset about it. They were explaining to me that we basically had all the evidence that we needed to prosecute, and they themselves didn't know why it got denied, so they couldn't give me a reason."

Her attorney, Kenneth Roosa, a former state and federal prosecutor who has represented the victims of priest abuse and other sex crimes for years, said he also was surprised. It would be one thing if the Justice Department said the evidence was bad, or they found Roberds to be a liar. But that wasn't the case, he said.

"For Paula, and certainly for me, the fact that they did this for what appears to be pretty clearly political reasons or some self-serving secret federal reason, it's pretty shocking and it's pretty disgusting," Roosa said.

"I'm not blaming the detectives," Roosa added. "But certainly, the attorneys in the Department of Justice have mishandled this case so badly that there ought to be an investigation of those guys as well. For them to allow a wealthy Alaska businessman to repeatedly sexually abuse an Alaska teenage girl and then get away with it, with the evidence and the documentary evidence as clear as it is in this case, is unfathomable."