Eileen Whitmer knew Marvin Roberts wasn’t guilty of murder in 1997, because when the Fairbanks Four were supposedly on a rampage killing teenager John Hartman, Roberts was sitting at a table with her at a wedding reception.

The Fairbanks Four defendants had many alibi witnesses, but they were convicted of murder anyway and spent 18 years in prison until being exonerated in December.

. . .

An Athabascan and Inupiat from Rampart, Whitmer, then with the name Newman, was working for Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. She has been a legislative staffer and a leader in her village corporation. Today she is business manager for Teamsters Local 959 in Fairbanks and president of the Fairbanks Joint Crafts Council.

She has never changed her story.

If Whitmer had been a white woman at a wedding reception with other white guests and had given her statement, I don’t think we would ever have heard of the Fairbanks Four. The true killers might have been caught.

The facts of the Fairbanks Four case are exceptional. Unfortunately, the cultural and racial divide it represents is not. Alaska’s prisons hold twice as many Natives as would be expected by their population. There are many reasons for that disparity, as I'll explore in my next column. But I think one reason is unconscious racial bias.