The Alaska Supreme Court has suspended the law license of former Alaska prosecutor Patrick Gullufsen for 18 months at the request of the Alaska Bar Association. Gullufsen stipulated to the charge, meaning he agreed it was warranted and did not protest the disciplinary action. The suspension originated from a 2010 case in which Gullufsen withheld the results of a DNA test from an accused murderer's defense attorneys and the court.

Before his 2010 retirement, partially because of failing health, Gullufsen had been a criminal attorney for 30 years who worked in Fairbanks, Juneau, Anchorage and Kenai. He's most well known for leading the failed prosecution of Mechele Linehan, who was originally found guilty of the 1996 murder of Kent Leppink -- a conviction that was later overturned and eventually dismissed.

In hearing documents obtained by the Alaska Dispatch Thursday, Gullufsen admitted to "misleading the court" during a 2010 cold case trial involving the March 1982 murder of Toni Lister near the Kenai Peninsula community of Seward.

Lister's body was found near the Seward dump on April 17, 1982, badly beaten and partially burned. She had been sexually assaulted, had a broken jaw, and had been stabbed 26 times in the head, chest and neck with a Phillips-head screwdriver. Then 28-year-old Jimmy Eacker, a Kenai man visiting relatives in Seward at the time, was alleged to be the last person to see Lister alive. Witnesses reported they saw the pair leave a local bar on the night of the murder. Other witnesses would later say they saw Eacker covered in blood the next day.

Eacker would later tell police he awoke in a truck he had borrowed with no memory of the previous night because he had been drinking and eating psychedelic mushrooms. Eacker claimed another man was responsible for Lister's death. A lack of evidence would cause the case to go cold for two decades.

According at the hearing documents, Lister's murder remained an unsolved open investigation until, in 2006, an evidence custodian in Seward found some old boxes containing swabs and vials taken from Listers' underwear and Eackers' blood-stained jeans obtained during the initial investigation in 1982. The evidence also included vials that once contained vaginal swabs obtained from Lister's body during her autopsy. Because DNA testing had progressed since the murder, the custodian turned in the samples for more testing.

That DNA test, conducted using samples from the vials, found that Eacker did not match the biological profile of the male DNA found. But the report also concluded that the quality of the result was poor -- due to the passing years and the fact that it was contaminated with a male lab technician's DNA. The report on the testing was given to Gullufsen, but was never turned over to the defense despite repeated questioning on the topic during trial -- by both Eacker's lawyers and the court -- as to its whereabouts.

Gullufsen initially said he didn't tell the court or the defense of the DNA report because it was of poor quality and he had ordered further testing on the vials -- testing that was ultimately never done because the original DNA check destroyed the evidence left inside the vials.

That failure was a determining factor when the court granted Eacker's request to have his 2010 first-degree murder conviction overturned in February of 2011. In December of that year, Eacker pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of manslaughter, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison, plus 10 years of probation.

It is the court's 2011 ruling that sparked the charge against Gullufsen, which eventually led to his suspension this month.

In the order suspending Gullufsen's law license, the attorney admitted he made false statements to the court about the DNA report.

Gullufsen claimed he had been battling leukemia -- the disease that ultimately led to his 2010 retirement -- and was overly fatigued during the trial.

Gullufsen, 66, said Thursday he would not comment about the suspension beyond what was already in the court hearing records, but did say he may never seek to practice law again.

"I'm getting up there in age," Gullufsen said.

The Alaska Department of Law, for whom Gullufsen worked as a cold-case prosecutor during Eacker's trial, said Thursday it had just received the Gullufsen suspension report. When asked whether the agency would be going through any other cases Gullufsen was involved in, Assistant Attorney General Cori Mills said only that "(w)e are reviewing the disciplinary order to determine if additional corrective steps are warranted."