Former Arizona politician Paul Petersen, who admitted running an illegal adoption scheme in three states involving women from the Marshall Islands, was on Tuesday sentenced in Arkansas to six years in federal prison.
It was the first of three punishments he faces for arranging adoptions prohibited by an international compact.
Petersen, who served as metro Phoenix’s assessor for six years and also worked as an adoption attorney, illegally paid women from the Pacific island nation to travel to the US to give up their babies in at least 70 adoptions cases in Arizona, Utah and Arkansas, prosecutors said.
Photo: AP
Marshall Islands citizens have been prohibited from traveling to the US for adoption purposes since 2003 and prosecutors said Petersen’s scheme lasted three years.
Judge Timothy Brooks, who imposed the sentence from Fayetteville, Arkansas, said that Petersen abused his position as an attorney by misleading or instructing others to lie to courts in adoptions that would not have been approved had the truth been told to them.
Brooks rejected Petersen’s claims that he initially thought he was acting within the bounds of the law, but later realized what he was doing was illegal.
“You knew that lying and making these false statements to immigration officials and state courts was wrong,” said Brooks, who gave Petersen two years longer in prison than sentencing guidelines recommended.
Appearing by videoconference, Petersen told the judge that his actions in the Arkansas case were not indicative of who he is as a person and offered an apology to any birth mothers who felt disrespected by his treatment of them.
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