Assemblyman, ex-prosecutor seek leniency for sex offender
ANCHORAGE – An Anchorage assemblyman, a former state prosecutor and the head of the state liquor board have written letters backing a businessman seeking a lenient sentence on drug and child sex trafficking charges.
The sentencing hearing of Josef Boehm, president of the Alaska Industrial Hardware chain, began last week and is expected to conclude this week.
Boehm pleaded guilty five months ago to conspiring to commit child sex trafficking and to providing drugs to people under age 21.
Prosecutors want U.S. District Judge John Sedwick to sentence Boehm, 61, to the maximum 11 years, according to its sentencing report. The defense is asking for “substantially less” than five years.
Boehm has been held in jail without bail since his arrest in December 2003.
“Boehm is an old man who has few years left to him,” the defense wrote the judge.
Boehm’s attorneys say he was so messed up on crack cocaine in the months before his arrest he could not have been an organizer in the ring at his home that involved more than a dozen teenagers between the ages of 13 and 19.
Anchorage Assemblyman Dan Coffey, a lawyer, told the judge he had represented Boehm four times over the last decade on commercial transactions. In 2001, when Boehm was in the grip of his crack addiction, he got involved in a business deal with a person of “low repute,” Coffey said, which was out of nature for him. He also could not focus on the deal ahead.
“He was difficult to contact,” Coffey wrote. “He missed meetings. He didn’t return phone calls.”
That sort of behavior only recently started to disappear, as Boehm has cleaned up, Coffey wrote.
“Look at those who are now blaming Joe for all the bad things that happened to them,” he told the judge in the letter. “If you do, I doubt you will find that any of them have made any contributions to our community. Joe has. He built a company which employs hundreds. These people who now point fingers at Joe, have never built anything. They are vultures who saw Joe’s addiction as a way to get to his wealth and they were all over him with their drugs and the other inducements.”
Read full article: Juneau Empire
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