Senators Catherine Cortez Masto and Lisa Murkowski, who teamed up and worked across the aisle to pass the "Not Invisible Act" and "Savanna's Act" to help put an end to Native violence, write that before the two laws there was no enduring strategy in the government to combat this ongoing epidemic.
“The current posture of that is that we are not connected to the internet, intentionally, and this may exist for another few days to a couple of weeks,” Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Thomas Temple said Wednesday in a teleconference call from his courtroom.
“I don’t know what the result is,” he said, but noted, “we will not be able to have a Zoom hearing this week” as planned.
Aside from a week’s worth of hearings in February in which the attorneys appeared in the courtroom, more recent pretrial hearings in the case have relied on videoconference, with only the judge appearing from the courtroom. Witnesses and attorneys have appeared via Zoom while defendant Steven Downs, 46, of Auburn has listened in and spoken by phone from jail.
Living a quiet life and working as a nurse in Maine, 44-year-old Steven Downs was surprised to receive a knock on his door from police about an Alaska murder.