The lives of three young Juneau residents changed forever on a sunny spring day two years ago after their car collided with a semi-truck. One was killed in the wreck. Another was permanently disabled. And now the driver is going to jail.
William M. Buchkoski, 20, will serve one year in prison after pleading guilty to two counts of third-degree assault, both stemming from the March 26, 2014, car accident. On Tuesday morning, Juneau Superior Court Judge Philip Pallenberg sentenced Buchkoski to two years in prison for each count of assault — a class C felonies which can carry up to three years in prison. He decided to suspend three years of the four-year sentence.
Pallenberg didn’t arrive at his decision easily. After hearing from the defendant and the victims’ family members, he had to take a 30-minute break to deliberate.
“I don’t think sending William Buchkoski to jail for a year is going to make him a better person,” Pallenberg told the court filled with mostly with members of the defendants’ family. “I don’t think it’s going to bring about his rehabilitation. I don’t think it’s necessary to deter him from committing similar offenses. But I think that the court has to take into account things beyond what’s best for William Buchkoski in imposing a sentence.”
A difficult balance
According to Pallenberg and Angie Kemp, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, the court has to maintain a delicate balance with each sentence. It has to reaffirm societal norms and deter people from committing similar crimes. But Kemp told the Empire Tuesday that the court has to accomplish both of these goals without punishing the offender to the point that rehabilitation is no longer possible.
“Some people think that we’re just out to get people — to incarcerate — but that’s not my view,” she said.
During the sentencing, Kemp explained that striking this balance made this one of the more difficult cases she has prosecuted.
“This was a tragic situation, and everyone, I think, wishes that the circumstances had been different that day and that different choices had been made,” she said.
The decisions that led to Tuesday’s sentencing all started at McDonalds about an hour and a half before the car accident that claimed the life of Jessica Billy, 18, and left Shadd Rudick, Buchkoski’s stepbrother, in a wheelchair without the ability to communicate verbally.
[Driver in 2014 fatal car crash pleads guilty]
It was there that Buchkoski smoked marijuana before driving — a decision that Kemp argued impaired his abilities and caused him to misjudge the distance between his 1999 CRV and an oncoming semi-truck as he turned left from Yandukin drive onto Old Dairy Road.
“Marijuana, by its very nature, is a drug that makes it difficult to perceive distances, spatial distances,” Kemp said, paraphrasing the report of one expert witness.
The skid marks left by the semi’s tires began about 100 feet away from where Buchkoski attempted to make his turn, Kemp said. That’s roughly the distance between home plate and first base, which is simply not enough time for a truck of that size going at between 40 and 50 miles per hour to stop, Kemp argued.
Tear-jerking testimony
Jessica Billy’s parents were present during the sentencing Tuesday, but they didn’t speak. They asked Kemp to read aloud a letter they wrote to Buchkoski.
“We hope you understand some day what you took from us. You used drugs to be happy and worry free; Jessica paid the ultimate consequence when you put her six feet under,” the Billys wrote in their letter. “Those of us grieving for Jessica, Shadd and his care providers, you left us with grief and suffering.”
Larry Rudick, the father of the crash’s other victim, also spoke during the sentencing. Though the Rudick family didn’t bury a son, “he is forever changed,” Pallenberg noted during the hearing.
Still, Shadd’s father spoke on Buchkoski’s behalf. Speaking in between sobs, he recognized that this has been a difficult time for all of the people involved, including Buchkoski, who was 18 at the time of the accident.
“Shadd and William are stepbrothers and have grown pretty close over the years,” Larry Rudick explained to the court. “I’ve had the last couple years to watch William struggle to deal with this horrible accident. It is a life changer for everybody.”
[Teen driver in fatal car crash charged with manslaughter, homicide, assault]
In the two years since the accident, the Billys haven’t spoken with Buchkoski, nor he with them. He was forbidden from doing so, per court order. Larry Rudick, on the other hand has maintained contact with Buchkoski, whom he said has grown up since the wreck.
Larry Rudick’s testimony left hardly an eye dry. Even Pallenberg had to wipe away tears when Larry Rudick spoke about how proud he was of the way Buchkoski was trying to move beyond the accident.
Buchkoski, too, was emotional during Larry Rudick’s testimony. He has played an important role in helping Buchkoski begin to move past the horrible event that will likely continue to shape his life forever. Buchkoski made this clear during his own testimony.
Since the accident, he said that he has struggled to deal with “the pain of losing my friend and my stepbrother.”
“It’s been really hard dealing with the survivors guilt and the PTSD from the accident,” Buchkoski told the court, almost inaudible at times nearly choking as he cried. “I went through times where I couldn’t know what to do or do anything. I just stayed in my room for months at a time. I got to a low point where I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror anymore. The night terrors kept me up for months at a time.”
After seeing a therapist for six months, the night terrors started to fade, but it was Larry Rudick’s support that helped expel them completely, Buchkoski said.
A sentence that fits
Before handing down the sentence, Pallenberg made it clear that his decision only took into account Buchkoski’s actions. The judgment, Pallenberg said, is not a reflection of the extent to which he values the victims.
“I have to decide today what to do about William Buchkoski who was at the wheel when this happened,” Pallenberg explained. “I want to make it clear that I don’t believe that the sentence that I impose today defines what your child’s lives are worth.”
A short sentence wouldn’t be “minimizing the value of your children’s lives,” he said. Likewise, a lengthy sentence wouldn’t be “affirming the value of their lives.”
If that were the case, Pallenberg said he’d impose the maximum sentence allowable, which in this case would be 10 years imprisonment, because the loss that they’ve suffered “is beyond reckoning.”
But if he were to impose such a sentence, he’d be applying the law incorrectly.
“There was once a law that called for an eye for an eye. That’s not our system of law,” Pallenberg said.
It’s not every year that there’s a fatal accident involving young people who were driving under the influence, but it seems to happen pretty frequently, Pallenberg said.
[Gone too soon: Family, friends reflect on Jessica Billy’s 18 years]
During the roughly 34 years he has lived in Juneau, Pallenberg said he has seen more “devastating” accidents involving high school kids around graduation time — though he acknowledged this one was a little earlier — than he cares to count. This is why he chose to give Buchkoski jail time, even though he recognized that the defendant wouldn’t benefit from the sentence.
“I think that the court needs to do what it can to send a message that substances — whether its alcohol or marijuana or anything else — and driving don’t mix, and that if a person uses those substances and a terrible accident results, something is going to get done about it,” Pallenberg said. “That person is going to be held accountable.”
Foreshadowing marijuana law changes
One of the things that made this case difficult to prosecute and to judge is the lack of precedent when it comes to driving under the influence of marijuana, ADA Kemp told the Empire Tuesday.
Officers recognized that Buchkoski’s eyes were red and watery when they responded to the accident, but they weren’t immediately able to draw blood to test for THC, the mind-altering chemical in marijuana.
By the time they got a warrant to obtain a blood sample, it had been about four hours since the accident, Kemp said. The blood test showed that Buchkoski had 1.7 nanograms of THC per millimeter of blood active in his system. It’s hard to say what exactly that means, though.
“Being around cases for a long time as a lawyer and a judge, I have an understanding of what .08 might mean in terms of alcohol, but I don’t have a good understanding of what these numbers might mean in terms of marijuana,” Pallenberg explained in court.
Beyond that, Alaska has no legal limit when it comes to THC content. Other states with legal marijuana do. Washington, for example, says that driving with less than 5 nanograms per milliliter of THC is all right. Kemp said that cases like Buchkoski’s will likely determine a need for setting such a limit in Alaska, too.
“Marijuana is something that I think we’re going to have to be able to learn about and deal with because these situations, I suspect, will continue to reoccur,” she told Pallenberg in court. “And in light of the changes legally to how we deal with marijuana, I suspect that its frequency might come up even more.”
• Contact reporter Sam DeGrave at 523-2279 or sam.degrave@juneauempire.com.
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