Alaska Judge Scandal Prompts First Conviction Challenge

An Alaska attorney for a man incarcerated for cyberstalking has asked to throw out the conviction over “judicial misconduct” by former judge Joshua Kindred and a senior prosecutor, in the first legal action since his resignation over sexual misconduct.

The Friday request was made on behalf of Rolando Hernandez-Zamora, found guilty in June by a jury in Joshua Kindred’s courtroom of cyberstalking his ex-partner. His trial occurred days before Kindred resigned after a judiciary panel found he sexually harassed his former clerk, created a hostile environment in chambers, and received nude photos from a senior federal prosecutor.

In requesting relief, Hernandez-Zamora’s attorney, Alexis Howell, likened Kindred’s conduct with his clerk, which included exchanging 278 pages of text messages with her, to cyberstalking.

Howell noted that in her client’s case, prosecutors entered 30 days of text messages, a one-page call log, and a few voicemail recordings, to show he had cyberstalked his ex. However, judicial investigators reviewed hundreds of pages of text messages between Kindred and his clerks as part of the probe into Kindred, the filing said.

“Some of Judge Kindred’s behavior meets the legal definition of cyberstalking,” the request said. “Justice requires the Court to order a new trial given that the subject matter of Rolando’s case is nearly identical to Judge Kindred’s judicial misconduct.”

Howell also took issue with the presence for the majority of the trial of the senior prosecutor who sent Kindred nude photos. The senior prosecutor, who didn’t officially appear in the case, was in the courtroom for the entire trial and was “observed speaking” to the two prosecutors assigned to the case “at length and in seeming detail,” the filing said.

The request doesn’t name the senior prosecutor, but Bloomberg Law has reported it was Karen Vandergaw, who was promoted to senior litigation counsel last year and has since been demoted.

This prosecutor “had no business entering the courtroom during Rolando’s trial either directly or indirectly, as by virtue of her mere presence, she influenced the outcome in this case,” the filing said.

And senior management at the US attorney’s office “were aware that this constituted a serious conflict of interest” in November 2022 after the judicial panel started investigating Kindred, and didn’t disclose it, the filing said.

The close timeline between proceedings in this case and the investigation of Kindred further “calls into question the integrity of the process,” the filing said. Kindred denied her client’s motion for acquittal on July 1, according to a public docket entry, just two days before the judge submitted his resignation.

Though the filing requests a new trial, or dismissal with prejudice, Howell said the due process concerns in this case means a new trial “is insufficient to cure the defect in this case.”

“Unfortunately, this case is far from an aberration, but rather part of a wide pattern of cases where the government and Judge Kindred failed to timely disclose this conflict. This warrants a sanction more severe than just a new trial without Kindred on the bench, because the USAO was complicit in this misconduct, and buried the conflict for two years,” the filing said.

Jamie McGrady, the federal defender in Alaska, said the request for a new trial due to Kindred’s misconduct is the “first of many.”

Kindred’s departure and misconduct findings have prompted reviews at both the US attorney’s office and at the Alaska federal defender’s office to evaluate potential conflicts of interest in the ex-judge’s past cases.

Criminal law attorneys outside Alaska have said there may be opportunities for cases to be reopened if conflicts of interest are found.

Earlier this week, McGrady called on the Justice Department’s watchdog to examine potential conflicts in a letter to US Attorney S. Lane Tucker. McGrady wrote in the letter that Tucker’s office is “in a poor position to identify and evaluate the damage from this scandal,” and asked prosecutors to disclose more information about the conflicts identified.