Ex-county assessor Petersen reports to federal prison in adoption scheme
Day one of Paul Petersen’s prison sentence started Thursday, when he checked into a federal penitentiary near El Paso. It will be another 2,249 days until he is scheduled to check out.
The former Maricopa County assessor, who confessed to running an illegal international adoption scheme that a federal judge described as a “baby-selling enterprise,” was sentenced last month to 74 months beginning Jan. 21.
His time in custody might not end there. In addition to federal charges in Arkansas, Petersen faces sentencing for fraud in Arizona and human trafficking in Utah, where he also pleaded guilty last year.
While Petersen and his attorneys maintain his guilty pleas came with a deal to ensure any state sentences run concurrent with his federal sentence, Arizona prosecutors say that is not the case.
The Arizona Attorney General’s Office said Wednesday it is not party to any agreement to cut the fraud sentence for Petersen. Based on his guilty pleas, he faces up to 16.5 years in prison in Arizona and up to 15 years in Utah.
The sentencing agreement Petersen made in Arizona is devoid of any socalled “global sentencing language,” a spokesperson for Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich said.
Petersen originally was scheduled to be sentenced this month in Maricopa County Superior Court, but that since has been delayed. Whatever time Petersen gets in Arizona will be decided by a judge, Brnovich’s office said.
Petersen in June admitted to using his private adoption business to illegally transport pregnant women to the United States from the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
In Arizona, Petersen admitted to fraudulently enrolling the birth mothers in Medicaid and cheating the state’s health care system for the poor out of more than $800,000. He also admitted forging documents to jack up the fees he charged adoptive parents.
At his sentencing hearing in Arkansas last month, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks said Petersen ran a
“get-rich-quick scheme ... hidden behind the shiny veneer of a humanitarian operation.”
Brooks could have given Petersen 10 years. The judge said he would recommend that the Utah and Arizona sentences be served concurrently with the federal sentence but noted that he cannot force the state courts to agree with his recommendation.
Petersen read a statement in court saying it was not his intention to harm anyone and expressing remorse that some Marshallese women he worked with may have felt that he took advantage of them for his own profit.
Just days after Brooks dropped his gavel, Petersen’s lawyers filed notice that they intend to challenge the sentence. They have until Feb. 16 to file a brief with the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis.
Petersen resigned as county assessor in 2020 to focus on his criminal defense. He was first elected in 2014 and again in 2016. His taxpayer-funded salary was about $77,000 per year. At the same time, he operated a law practice focused on adoptions.
Petersen was arrested in October 2019. Federal and state authorities said he created a pipeline to bring Marshallese women to the U.S., arranged for them to give birth in local hospitals and set up adoptions of their babies to American families for up to $40,000 each.
Authorities said Petersen and his associates convinced as many as 70 women to give up their babies.
Virtually all of the adoptions Petersen arranged through his Mesa law office were with birth mothers from the Republic of the Marshall Islands.
Citizens of the Marshall Islands, which is located near the equator in the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the Philippines, can travel to the U.S. freely under the Compact of Free Association between the two countries.
In 2003, the compact was amended to forbid women from traveling for adoption purposes.
Contracts, texts, emails and internal documents obtained by The Arizona Republic showed Petersen treated the birth mothers and their children like monetary transactions.
He moved multiple women in and out of homes he owned in Mesa, outside Salt Lake City and Springdale, Arkansas; took cuts for living expenses out of money he promised birth mothers and made them live in cramped, squalid conditions.
A Republic investigation in April found 20 of the Marshallese women gave birth at Banner Gateway Medical Center in Mesa.
The women were admitted to the hospital within weeks of arriving in the U.S. Most did not speak English. They listed the same addresses on Medicaid forms. Yet Banner officials continued filing Medicaid paperwork for the women and submitting reimbursement claims to the state, records show.
Petersen’s adoption practice was rooted in his 1998 mission to the Marshall Islands for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
A top church official said he was disgusted and sickened by the details of Petersen’s case.
Petersen’s parents maintain online that he was forced to take a guilty plea. They have established a website to help raise funds for his defense.
The website contends Petersen spent “20 years doing good” and “facilitated the legally approved adoptions of five hundred children into homes with parents who wanted them.”
The website also says Petersen was wrongly accused of defrauding the state’s Medicaid system and indicates he has reimbursed the state.
The website maintains that the real victims in the case are Petersen and his family.
Petersen in June admitted to using his private adoption business to illegally transport pregnant women to the United States from the Republic of the Marshall Islands. In Arizona, Petersen admitted to fraudulently enrolling the birth mothers in Medicaid and cheating the state’s health care system for the poor out of more than $800,000. He also admitted forging documents to jack up the fees he charged adoptive parents.