OLSON TAPES PODCAST: "Threatened with perjury"
- Written by Extreme Alaska
- Dissenting Opinion
- Hartman evidence
Arlo Olson, the state's star witness in all three Hartman murder trials, vented about being manipulated by police and the DA in
a series of jailhouse interviews stretching from November 2002 through April 2003.
“I was threatened with perjury,” he said in an interview recorded in January 2003, “and then I was threatened with going to jail and them sending the troopers out to get me.
“I didn’t want to testify,” he added. “I told them I wasn’t sure. And they kept showing me bits and pieces (of the interrogation statements). I guess to make me, you know, feel sure of what I was doing. And it did.”
Listen to a 20-minute podcast about Arlo Olson's shifting accounts of what he saw the night John Hartman died.
https://soundcloud.com/brian-patrick-odonoghue/olson-tapes-what-arlo-saw-the
BARD-A-THON 2013: Live and Will in Fairbanks
- Written by Extreme Alaska
- Arts
- Bard-a-thon
One more the Bard's words sail across cyberspace. Local volunteers pitch in around the clock whispering, barking, crying and humbling reading WIlliam Shakespeare's peerless pages, reigniting imagination across the ages.
Get the schedule an video stream here.
If music is the only reward, Fairbanks Shakespeare Volunteers are officially on break. Expect other hiccups as our local players sometimes miss their cues, along with tongue-tied stumbles and bathroom breaks, pardon such pauses and be patient, dear audience. Action, such as there is, will resume.
In keeping with this Far North tradition, Will's readers soldier forward until his cannon is complete. This year that means Jan. 29.
Better yet, head down to the Empress and embrace immortality adding your voice to the joyous flood of words.
When the innocent confess
- Written by Brian Patrick O'Donoghue
- Dissenting Opinion
- Hartman evidence
DNA exonerations in dozens of capital cases prove that people sometimes falsely confess.
Still, self-incrimination someone who's innocent goes against common sense. It goes against what many of us, including justice-minded jurors, may be prepared to accept sometimes happoens after a blameless suspect freely agrees to talk with police.
Circumstances surrounding false confessions have long interested criminal justice researchers. With the recent appellate decision reviving Eugene Vent's quest for a new trial, a pair studies offers insight:
For starters, one study found that an innocent person may actually be less able to cope with a determined interrogator, confident in his ability fo pre-assess a suspect's guilt. In such circmstances, refusal to own up to a crime may be taken as suspicous, denials perceived as evasive, adding to the investigator's certainty that he's facing the "right" suspect.
An eroding village
- Written by Molly Lane
“Be ready," crackled the CB radio voice, "This could be it. Get your family right with God.”
The warning Tuesday, Nov. 8, alerted the 400 residents of Kivalina, an Inupiat village on Alaska's northwest Coast, to an approaching hurricane-force storm.
Notified the previous day, Kivalina Mayor Thomas Hanifan Jr. and other members of the village's incident response team were already preparing. The mayor was in touch with the medics and other emergency responders standing by in Kotzebue and other regional transportation hubs.
Evacuation was not in the plans, but the McQueen School, a K-12 school with about 100 students, would be open for people seeking shelter. The building only had about seven rooms to hold the 400 people. The building, which sat about 20 feet above the ground, was considered safer than most of the ground-level structures located in the path of a potential storm surge.
Seeing Tikigaq Through Uncle Hank-O's Snow Goggles
- Written by Qian Li
- Arts
- Native Arts
This documentary is about an Inuit artist, Henry Koonook, carving a tranditional hunting tool - Snow Goggles. He misses the peaceful past that Point Hope used to be, and carving reminds him of it.
