Kenai man sentenced for mailing threat to state judge

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – A Kenai man has been sentenced to five years in federal prison for threatening a state judge.

Steven Bachmeier, 43, was sentenced to the maximum sentence allowed by federal statute, federal prosecutors announced Tuesday. The prison term will be followed by three years of supervised release, prosecutors said.

Bachmeier in May 2010 faced criminal charges and tried to withdraw a guilty plea. The judge in the case denied his request and Bachmeier threatened to “carve the flesh” from the judge’s children, prosecutors said.

He was sentenced to eight years in prison in the criminal case.

In January 2017, Bachmeier tried to have his name legally changed and the matter was assigned to the same judge who presided over his criminal case. That angered Bachmeier, prosecutors said, and he mailed a pleading to the court in which he wrote, “I have told her in past I’m going to kill her family, which I still entend to do.”

A federal jury in January 2019 convicted Bachmeier of mailing a threatening communication. U.S. District Judge Sharon Gleason sentenced him Friday, prosecutors said.