Retrial for former Juneau chiropractor accused of sexual assault still has no set trial date
The retrial against a former Juneau chiropractor accused of assaulting more than a dozen women still has no set trial date, nearly a year after the first trial.
The state prosecutor said if a retrial isn’t scheduled soon, it may not happen until 2027.
Jeffrey Fultz went on trial in 2025, more than four years after he was arrested for alleged assaults while he was employed at Southeast Alaska Regional Health Consortium. The alleged abuse happened from 2014 to 2020. The trial lasted six weeks and ended in two counts not guilty, and a deadlocked jury on a dozen other counts.
The judge in the case declared two counts a mistrial during proceedings, and later dismissed one more charge. That means 13 counts of assault remain which Fultz can be tried again.
But the court hasn’t scheduled a new trial yet.
The court assigned Fultz a public defender in October, Juneau’s Nico Ambrose. He said he still needs more time, and he isn’t trying to stall.
“When I make a request for time, I really mean it,” Ambrose said. “That’s the time that I think it takes. We’re not messing around here. We’re not trying to delay things intentionally.
Ambrose asked for a continuance until October. But State Prosecutor Krystyn Tendy said that could risk it being pushed until after the holiday season and into next year.
“The reality is, given the number of witnesses that we have, given the length of this trial, by putting this onto an October readiness block, it is ensuring that the case will not go to trial until the next year,” Tendy said. “Which is what we have been trying to avoid this whole time.”
Presiding Judge Larry Woolford scheduled a readiness hearing for mid-September, which would allow for an October trial at the earliest. Another hearing for the Fultz case takes place later this month to deal with a specific motion by the defense related to the investigation.
Woolford also set a deadline for the parties to request any new information from each other by the end of July, and said he plans to file a motions deadline for August 31.