How Do I Adopt a Marshall Islands Baby in Arkansas

FILE - In this Nov. 5, 2019 file photo, former Maricopa Canton Assessor Paul Petersen, right, with his attorney, Kurt Altman, go out later a courtroom hearing in Phoenix. Petersen, who admitted running an illegal adoption scheme in three states involving women from the Republic of the marshall islands, was sentenced in Arkansas to six years in federal prison house on Tuesday, Dec. 1, 2020. It was the first of 3 punishments he'll face for arranging adoptions prohibited by an international compact.

PHOENIX -- A former Phoenix politico already in prison on a six-year judgement for operating an illegal adoption scheme in Arkansas involving women from the Marshall Islands was ordered to serve another five years behind confined for defrauding Arizona's Medicaid system in a scam to go taxpayer-funded health coverage for the birth mothers, even though he knew they didn't live in the country.

Paul Petersen, a Republican who was Maricopa County's elected assessor for half-dozen years and worked as an adoption attorney, on Fri received the second of three sentences stemming from the adoption scheme. His five-year Arizona punishment is to be served after he completes his six-twelvemonth federal sentence for conspiring to smuggle people in Arkansas.

Petersen, who is scheduled to receive his third sentence Monday in Utah for human smuggling convictions, was dressed in an orangish prison suit in the Phoenix courtroom, where he offered apologies and cried as he described hurting his clients, former co-workers and his own family through his practices.

"I have no ane to arraign but myself," he said.

Authorities have said Petersen illegally paid women from the Pacific island nation to requite up their babies in at least lxx adoption cases in Arizona, Arkansas and Utah. Citizens of the Republic of the marshall islands accept been prohibited from traveling to the United states of america for adoption purposes since 2003.

He was sentenced in Arizona for submitting false applications to the state's Medicaid organisation so the significant Marshall islands women could receive health coverage and for providing an affidavit to a court that contained false information about expenses paid to a birth mother.

"Judges in these cases were given false information and that subverted the legal process by which judges made decisions in these adoptions," Judge Thomas Fink said soon earlier sentencing Petersen.

Prosecutors say Petersen knew the nascency mothers involved in the scheme didn't see an Arizona requirement that Medicaid recipients reside in the state, yet he still instructed a woman working in his adoption practice to line upwardly Medicaid coverage for them. In one case, authorities said a birth mother whose medical expenses were covered by Medicaid delivered her child a twenty-four hour period after arriving in Arizona and was flown out of the land nearly two weeks later.

Prosecutors likewise said Petersen regularly misrepresented in filings with a juvenile court how long he had been paying expenses for birth mothers, claiming in one instance v months of expenses for a birth mother who was in Arizona for less than a month. Petersen was accused of instructing the woman helping his adoption practise to submit a alphabetic character of residency for a birth mother who had already left Arizona in a bid to avert having to cover her medical bills. Authorities said each adoption became more assisting for Petersen when those costs were covered by the government.

In a letter last year to the gauge in the Arkansas case, Petersen said he is now aback, equally a fiscal conservative, for sticking Arizona taxpayers with the pregnancy labor and delivery costs.

His attorney, Kurt Altman, has argued his customer recognizes the wrongfulness of his deportment, pleaded guilty to charges in iii states, no longer has a license to do law, and has paid dorsum $679,000 in wellness care costs to Arizona out of the more than $800,000 that prosecutors said the fraud cost taxpayers.

Altman has argued government never asked Petersen to adjust or cease his adoption practice over the years and argued that the practise wasn't at issue in the Arizona case, because those convictions pertained to fraud in both health intendance and in the filing of court records.

Prosecutors didn't specify the number of years in prison they were seeking for Petersen, but said he should accept to spend boosted time behind bars on elevation of his Arkansas sentence.

"This wasn't a onetime situation," prosecutor Scott Blake said.

In the Arkansas case, Petersen was given a prison term that was two years longer than sentencing recommendations chosen for after a federal approximate ended Petersen misled or instructed others to lie to courts about adoptions that wouldn't accept been approved had the truth been told.

That gauge too flatly rejected Petersen's claims that he initially thought he was acting within the premises of the constabulary merely later on realized what he was doing was illegal. Investigators estimated Petersen handled a minimum of thirty Marshallese adoptions a year in Northwest Arkansas.

His Oct 2019 indictment in Arkansas left 19 birth mothers and the prospective adoptive parents in legal limbo in Washington County Circuit Court. Those cases were dealt with under sealed records.

Petersen'due south Arkansas law firm kept as many as 12 pregnant women at a time in a single-family home in Springdale, according to court documents. As many as 10 at a time lived in another home in De Queen, according to statements made at Petersen's plea hearing.

Petersen has appealed the Arkansas sentence.

Northwest Arkansas has the largest concentration of Marshallese in the U.s.a. other than Hawaii, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Petersen opened a branch of his law business firm in Fayetteville in 2014, according to court records.

Petersen is a member of The Church building of Jesus Christ of Latter-twenty-four hour period Saints and earlier in his life completed a proselytizing mission in the Marshall islands, a collection of atolls and islands in the eastern Pacific, where he became fluent in the Marshallese language.

After the allegations of adoption fraud emerged, Petersen kept working as the assessor for the most populous Arizona county for nearly three months amidst heavy force per unit area to resign -- and he did so in Jan 2020. He was responsible for determining property values in the county that includes Phoenix.

Petersen has said he helped people with hundreds of legal adoptions after he discovered a niche locating homes for vulnerable children from the Marshall islands and helping needy mothers who wanted a more stable family unit life for their children.

How Do I Adopt a Marshall Islands Baby in Arkansas

Source: https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/mar/20/prison-extended-in-marshallese-adoption-scam/