Two Youths Banished to Island May Be Given Prison Sentence

Amid signs that an experiment in criminal justice is breaking down, a Washington state judge Tuesday recalled two Native American teen-agers from Alaska, where they have spent the last year banished to remote islands in a novel arrangement with a Tlingit Indian tribal court.

Simon Roberts and Adrian Guthrie, both 18, confessed last year to robbing and beating a pizza deliveryman in Everett, Wash. They were ordered to appear next month in Snohomish County Superior Court to explain why they shouldn’t have to face a standard sentencing hearing “immediately in the interest of justice,” according to the judge’s order. He called the tribe’s supervision of the punishment “confused, unstable and potentially insecure.”

In the controversial plan devised last year, Judge James H. Allendoerfer allowed a panel of 12 Tlingit elders to pass and administer a traditional sentence of banishment to uninhabited Alaskan islands, where Roberts and Guthrie would live off the land, learn Tlingit customs and reflect on their crimes. The elders also committed themselves to paying restitution to the victim in the form of cash and a custom built house. Allendoerfer agreed to defer sentencing until March, 1996, after the boys would have spent 18 months on the islands.

But recent disputes within the tribal court have split it into two factions, each advocating “conflicting plans for the future of these cases,” Allendoerfer wrote. One side contends that both boys are benefiting from the plan, while the other reported to Allendoerfer that Roberts needs serious medical and psychological evaluation to avoid a “tragedy.”

And county prosecutors in Washington state, who have vehemently opposed the plan from the beginning, were concerned by reports that the two natives of Klawock, an Alaskan fishing village, occasionally were seen conducting personal business in Southeast Alaskan towns close to the sites. Tim Whittlesey, the 25-year-old victim who has chronic hearing and vision problems as a result of the attack, has received little cash and no new house.

Roberts could be sentenced to 5 1/2 years and Guthrie 3 1/2 years in state prison.