Alaska Native Who Alleged Wrongful Murder Conviction Reaches $11.5M Settlement

An Alaska Native man who maintained his innocence in the 1997 killing of a white teenager has agreed to an $11.5 million settlement with the city of Fairbanks after alleging police acted with a racial bias in a case in which he and three other Indigenous men spent nearly two decades in prison.

Marvin Roberts is the last of the so-called Fairbanks Four to reach a settlement with the city after their murder convictions were vacated in 2015. U.S. District Court Judge Sharon Gleason dismissed his long-running civil lawsuit against the city and police officers on Thursday at the request of the parties involved.

“I don’t think any amount of money will be enough to justify what I endured as an innocent man in prison,” Roberts said in a recent statement released 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 throughout this nightmare.”

Fairbanks city attorney Tom Chard confirmed the city and its insurance carriers had agreed to an $11.5 million settlement. Terms of the agreement set out a payment schedule, the last due by Oct. 1, 2026. The agreement stipulates that the settlement “shall not be construed as an admission of liability or responsibility” by the defendants.

The settlement is a “complete vindication of Marvin Roberts’ innocence, which he has maintained with extraordinary dignity for almost three decades,” one of Roberts’ attorneys, Nick Brustin of Neufeld Scheck Brustin Hoffmann & Freudenberger, LLP, said in a statement released by the New York-based civil rights firm.

The agreement comes nearly 1 1/2 years after the other three men, George Frese, Eugene Vent and Kevin Pease, agreed to accept $1.59 million each from the city’s insurer. The city said that settlement was “not an admission of liability or fault of any kind.”

Alaska Native leaders long advocated for the men’s release, saying the convictions were racially motivated. Pease is Native American; Frese, Vent and Roberts are Athabascan Alaska Natives. Roberts was the only one of the four who was on parole at the time the convictions were thrown out.

A 2015 settlement in a civil case brought by the men that led to the convictions being thrown out followed a weeks-long hearing that reexamined the case in detail and raised the possibility others had killed 15-year-old John Hartman. While the four men each maintained their innocence, the Alaska Department of Law said the settlement was not an exoneration.

The men would argue the settlement that led to their release — in which they agreed not to sue — was not legally binding because they were coerced. An appeals court panel ruled in their favor.

Fairbanks Police spokesperson Teal Soden said the agency still lists Hartman’s killing as an “open/active” case.