An investigative blog examining evidence of injustice in Alaska's Hartman murder case.
OLSON TAPES: Prison call transcripts
- Written by Extreme Alaska
Weigh Arlo Olson's words:
OLSON TAPES: FCC Transcripts (62 kB)
I transcribed these taped conversations in 2003-04 for use reporting on Arlo Olson’s role identifying suspects arrested in the Hartman murder case.
Audio quality of these recordings varies. Olson’s comments are presented verbatim to the best of my ability with remarks I’m unsure of indicated in upper case letters, often with question marks and brackets. My own questions and comments are noted in italics and may be shortened or paraphrased.
Transcribing takes a lot of time. I skipped over portions of our conversations that did not concern Olson’s testimony about the night of Hartman’s assault or his appearances as a trial witness. As always, I still have the original tapes stored away back in Fairbanks.
How Arlo landed on tape
- Written by Extreme Alaska
Arlo Olson wasn’t easy to find.
Through winter 2001 spring 2002, I had been trying to interview Olson about his starring role in all three Hartman murder trials. I’d left messages with his grandfather, his mother, his ex-girlfriend and anywhere else I thought might reach him. Finally he called back and left a message on my answering machine demanding to know what I wanted.
I played that message for my Investigative Reporting students, who were tackling the Hartman case as a class project. “Arlo’s going to talk,” I declared.
“But he sounds angry,” a student pointed out. “What makes you think he’ll talk?”
“He just opened the conversation.”
OLSON TAPES PODCAST: "Threatened with perjury"
- Written by Extreme Alaska
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
When the innocent confess
- Written by Brian Patrick O'Donoghue
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.
New crack in Vent's prison wall
- Written by Extreme Alaska
The Alaska Court of Appeals has granted Eugene Vent's long-standing request for a new hearing weigning his complaint that poor representation contributed to the guilty verdict accompanying his 1999 trial for the murder of John Hartman.
The decision, issued earlier this month, reverses Judge Ben Esch's 2009 ruling justifying his earlier decision blocking false confession expert Richard Leo from taking the stand in the original trial. This means Vent, who was 17 at the time of his '97 arrest, can look forward to a new hearing, before a new judge, on his motion for post conviction relief.
Vent was sentenced to more than 30 years for his role in 15-year-old Hartman's fatal assault. Three other classmates from Howard Luke Academy, Marvin Roberts, George Frese and Kevin Pease, were also convicted of the crime. The group, known as the Fairbanks Four, are serving prison sentences ranging up to 79 years.
Meanwhile, read the decision.
And the News-Miner's story.