A judge has thrown out a former Eagle River nurse practitioner’s convictions for overprescribing pain medication, after a scandal ousted the previous judge overseeing the case.
A jury in 2022 found Jessica Spayd guilty of 10 felonies, including distributing opioids that resulted in the overdose deaths of five people. In 2023, former U.S. District Court Judge Joshua Kindred sentenced Spayd to 30 years in prison. She then appealed.
But in 2024 a report from the 9th Circuit Judicial Council revealed Kindred had engaged in inappropriate, sexualized relationships with two federal prosecutors in the Alaska U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Kindred resigned in July of 2024, leaving dozens of criminal cases up for review for possible conflicts of interest.
In a roughly 1,000-page filing earlier this year, Spayd’s attorneys argued that the judge had been in a compromised position, with a motive to rule in the federal government’s favor, and therefore that Spayd had been treated unfairly. They asked the new judge in the case to throw out Spayd’s convictions and sentence.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office responded with a filing disputing the defense attorneys’ claims, saying the two prosecutors embroiled in the Kindred scandal had not worked directly on Spayd’s case.
The new judge in the case, Marco Hernandez, has apparently agreed with Spayd’s attorneys and ordered her convictions thrown out.
According to an order Friday from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sending Spayd’s case back to Hernandez and the Alaska District Court, Hernandez had tossed out the judgement against Spayd on Aug. 25. Hernandez’s order itself remained under seal as of Wednesday.
The judge’s ruling leaves the federal prosecutors to decide whether they want to appeal, put Spayd on trial again or resolve the case in another way.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment, as did a lawyer for Spayd.
A database for federal inmates shows Spayd remained behind bars Wednesday at a Connecticut prison, though Judge Hernandez has directed the U.S. Marshals Service to make arrangements to return Spayd to Alaska so she can be present at a status conference set for October.
Spayd isn’t the first defendant to get a shot at a new trial in the fallout from the Kindred scandal.
Rolando Hernandez-Zamorra had been convicted in a cyberstalking case and won a new trial in 2024, during which he was again convicted.
Efforts to win a new trial for former Anchorage police officer Nathan Keays, convicted of fraud in Kindred’s courtroom, continue.
