The legal farce of the runaway grand jury enabled by AG Tregarrick Taylor

Chronic complainer David Haeg, given an official forum by the Dunleavy administration to spread his baseless whining that the world is conspiring against him, has received the legal defeat he deserves.

Superior Court Judge Thomas Matthews has tossed the hopelessly tainted grand jury indictment against retired District Court Judge Margaret Murphy.

The case will be dismissed if the prosecutor, hired under a state contract, doesn’t act within 10 days to try to get a new indictment. A new indictment would only prolong an embarrassing and inept sideshow that has brought shame to the Alaska Department of Law.

There is no doubt that Haeg will complain he has been mistreated once more, continuing his 20-year campaign to find someone to blame for his misdeeds. A jury convicted Haeg of five counts of unlawful acts by a guide, hunting wolves the day he was airborne, two counts of unlawful possession of game, one count of lying, and trapping wolverine out of season.

Over the years he has blamed his attorneys, as well as prosecutors, judges, Alaska State Troopers and others without accepting responsibility. He has long held a grudge against Murphy.

What is missing from the ruling by Matthews is a clear statement that the entire proceeding was an abuse of the system that should have been halted long ago.

A catalog of accusations has been a standard part of Haeg’s repertoire in the two decades since he was convicted of illegally shooting wolves from an airplane.

Haeg was given a starring role with the runaway grand jury, courtesy of the attorney general and assisted by Rep. Ben Carpenter, who pushed Taylor to accede to Haeg’s demands.

“I expect that a grand jury will be convened by mid-May to consider your case,” Carpenter wrote to Haeg on April 14, 2022 after meeting with Taylor. Carpenter said he knew that Haeg had “many reasons to distrust the process and the players . . .”

As soon as the so-called indictment with no details of any crime was released, the case should have been dropped. Even the prosecutor, hired by the AG under contract, had to confess in court that the case was a shambles.

As I wrote here on January 15, I was certain that the legal case against the retired judge would fail because it was flawed on many levels.

Matthews has taken the only step he could, rejecting the indictment because there was not a grand jury quorum, there was no specific charge of perjury, the grand jury was given the wrong jury instructions and the indictment was based on inadmissible evidence.

The airing of grievances by Haeg went on for four hours on August 2, 2022.

“Further, Mr. Haeg’s ‘testimony’ was essentially a freeform lecture by Mr. Haeg to the grand jury in which he outlined his grievances about lawyers, judges and other public officials, his theories about corruption and the legal system, and his own personal views about what the law should be,” Matthews wrote.

Here is the ruling by Matthews dismantling every point in the state’s case.

The state should drop this case before the attorney general does more damage to the reputation of the Department of Law. This was a case of mob rule, blessed by the negligence of the attorney general.

The waste of state funds and the injustice set in motion by Taylor’s pandering deserves a complete investigation, but it won’t get one.

The Dunleavy proposed budget asks for $500,000 a year for more “investigative grand juries.”

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