A native Alaska man who maintained his innocence in the 1997 murder of a white teenager hashreer to a $ 11.5 million agreement with the city of Fairbanks after claiming that the police acted with a racial bias in a case almost men in the other numerous men.
Marvin Roberts is the last of the calls Fairbanks four To reach an agreement with the city after his murder sentences were vacancies in 2015. The judge of the United States District Court, Sharon Gleason, dismissed his long -standing civil lawsuit against the city and police officers on Thursday at the request of the parties involved.
“I don’t think any money is enough to justify what I ended as an innocent man in prison,” Roberts said in a recent statement issued by one of the law firms that represented him. “This settlement, however, gives me freedom with my life, and most importantly, more time with my daughter and my parents, who supported me through this nightmare.”
Mark Thiessen / AP 
The lawyer of the city of Fairbanks, Tom Chard, confirmed that the city and its insurance companies had agreed to an agreement of $ 11.5 million. The terms of the agreement established a payment schedule, the last due before October 1, 2026. The agreement stipulates that the agreement “will not be conducted as an admission of responsibility or responsibility” by the defendants.
The agreement is a “complete claim of the innocence of Marvin Roberts, which has been coined with extraordinary dignity for almost three decades”, one of Roberts’s lawyers, Nick Brustin or Neufeld Scheck Brustin Hoffmann and Freudenberger, civil rights signature.
The agreement occurs almost 1 1/2 years after the other three men, George Free, Eugene Vent and Kevin Pease, acre to accept $ 1.59 million each of the city insurer. The city said the agreement “was not an admission of responsibility or guilt of any kind.”
Roberts decided not to settle in 2023, but chose to advance with the appeal, Ktuu reported.
“Everyone offered, you know, more than $ 1.6 million each. Three of the four tokins that the lawyer” Roberts “Mike Kramer said, according to the station.” It is difficult to get away from a million dollars, particularly when the city still says “you are guilty and we will appeal everything in this case and we will drag this until you are old men.”
Native Alaska leaders advocated a long time for the release of men, saying that convictions were racially motivated. Pease is a American native; Forese, Vent and Roberts are native to Alaska. Roberts was the only one of the four who was on probation at the time the convictions were expelled.
A 2015 agreement in a civil case presented by the men who led to the convictions that are dismissed followed a long -lasting weekly audience that reexamined the case in detail and raised the possibility that others had killed John Hartman, 15 years old. While the four men maintained their innocence, the Alaska Law department said the agreement was not an exemption.
The men would argue that the agreement that led to their liberation, in which they accept no SAE, was not legal binding because they were coerced. A panel of the Court of Appeals ruled in his favor.
The Fairbanks police spokesman, Teal Sid, the agency still lists Hartman’s murder as an “open/active” case.
