Arizona politician sentenced over adoption scheme

A U.S. district judge in Fayetteville, Ark., on Tuesday dished out a six-year jail term to Paul Petersen for running an illegal adoption scheme in three states. Petersen, a Republican, worked as an elected county assessor in Arizona and also as an adoption attorney. He received a $100,000 fine and faces additional sentences next month for convictions in Utah and Arizona.

What are the charges against him? Prosecutors said Petersen illegally facilitated about 70 adoptions in the three states by matching pregnant women from the Marshall Islands – a Pacific island country between Hawaii and the Philippines – with wealthy adoptive families in the United States. Investigators say he swindled taxpayers by signing the women up for Medicaid to pay for their healthcare. Peterson had completed mission work as a Mormon in the Marshall Islands in 1998 and made contacts that helped him establish his adoption practice.

Dig deeper: Read Mary Jackson’s report in Relations on the case.