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ANCHORAGE - Robert Hale, a self-styled mountain man who took his family far away from modern civilization to raise them by the Bible, was sentenced Tuesday to 14 years in prison for sexually assaulting a daughter.

Judge Donald Hopwood imposed the sentence after more than a dozen heart-wrenching victim-impact statements were delivered in court, including from his wife and many of their 16 children, who told horrific stories of physical and mental abuse.

Their message was clear: Send the 66-year-old Hale to jail for a long time because they feared what would happen if he were to be released.

Hopwood called it “one of the worst cases of domestic violence I’ve seen.”

Hale spent much of Tuesday on the stand, denying charges of sexual and physical abuse made against him by his family members.

But Hopwood said he simply didn’t believe Hale’s denials, and the testimony of so many witnesses speaking consistently could be believed.

Hale received 10 years for sexual assault, and two years each for incest and coercion.

Hale insisted that he had a perfect spiritual understanding, his wife, Kurina Rose Hale, testified Monday.

“This is how he justified all his immoral activity,” she said.

Hale was accused of persuading one child that, as a “special kind of daughter,” she must have sex with him.

The sexual abuse culminated with an incident in the tiny community of McCarthy, about 275 miles east of Anchorage in Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

That’s where Hale locked his daughter in a shed for three days and sexually assaulted and beat her so badly her face looked like a black-and-blue basketball, according to another daughter’s testimony.

Two other daughters finally had enough and took a snowmobile to notify authorities.

Hale ran from law enforcement for two weeks before he was taken into custody.

Other children testified of prolonged beatings at the hands of the family patriarch.

Hale and his family first came to prominence in Alaska during a feud with the National Park Service. Family members used a bulldozer without permission to clear an abandoned mining road to get to their land within the 13.2-million-acre national park, the nation’s largest.

National land-rights advocates rallied to their cause and stories featured their plight as a case of big government vs. simple, God-fearing, music-loving, live-off-the-land folks.

As a Sikh, Sukhvir Singh says he has encountered racial harassment before, but he never feared it could lead to his death.

But on Saturday, police say, the Orange Cab driver withstood a violent attack from a drunken passenger who punched him, bit off a piece of his scalp, called Singh an “Iraqi terrorist” and threatened to kill him. The attack ended after a Metro bus pulled up to the cab and a passenger called 911.

Luis Vázquez, a 20-year-old construction worker from Kent, was charged Tuesday with third-degree assault and one count of malicious harassment, the state’s hate-crime law. If convicted, Vázquez faces up to a year in jail, according to a spokesman for the King County Prosecutor’s Office.

After the attack, Singh was treated at Harborview Medical Center and released. He was later admitted to Valley Medical Center in Renton and remains hospitalized because of kidney problems. He said it’s unclear whether the problems are a result of the attack.

Speaking from his hospital bed Tuesday, Singh said it is difficult to talk about the attack, but he is grateful for the outpouring of support from the community.

“I live here, and I love America. I love to serve my community and my people here,” said Singh, of Kent, a father of two. “It’s very hard to think about.”

Intoxicated passenger

Singh was stopping at a Montlake neighborhood grocery to grab dinner Saturday before 8 p.m. when Seattle police escorted an obviously drunken man to his cab, said the cabdriver’s attorney, Hardeep Rekhi. Singh, a cabdriver for seven years, said it’s not uncommon for police to place intoxicated people in his cab so they can be driven home.

Authorities say the passenger was Vázquez. They said he had been kicked out of the Apple Cup football game at Husky Stadium.

While Singh was driving Vázquez home, Vázquez started calling him a terrorist and threatened to kill him, according to court charging documents. Singh said he worried for his life and the lives of other motorists as he drove down Interstate 5 at 60 mph.

Singh pulled over just south of the exit for Interstate 90, according to charging papers.

Vázquez followed Singh as he left the cab and continued the attack, court papers said. It was only when a Metro bus pulled up and Vázquez tried to board that the attack stopped, according to charging papers.

Vázquez later told investigators that he was afraid of Singh because Vázquez “had a buddy in Iraq,” according to charging papers. Singh isn’t Iraqi. He’s an Indian-born member of the Sikh religion, which claims up to a half-million followers in the U.S.

Because the case appears to be a hate crime, the FBI has launched a civil-rights inquiry, said spokeswoman Robbie Burroughs. The facts gathered by agents will be sent to the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and if attorneys there think more information is necessary, the FBI will launch a full-blown investigation, Burroughs said.

The New York-based Sikh Coalition had pushed for prosecutors to file the case as a hate crime.

Rekhi, the Seattle attorney representing Singh, said his client is pleased with the filing decision.

Singh said that even though he has never been called such awful names, his fellow Sikh cabdrivers have faced worse violence and terror.

On Sept. 13, 2001, Farwest Cab driver Kulwinder Singh was assaulted and accused of being a Middle East terrorist by an intoxicated passenger he picked up in SeaTac. Raymond Isais Jr., 21, of San Diego, pleaded guilty to malicious harassment.

“Safe transport”

Explaining why officers placed a drunken man in Singh’s cab, Seattle police Sgt. Deanna Nollette said the department’s protocol with intoxicated people is to simply find them “safe transport.”

The State Patrol, which is also investigating the attack, doesn’t believe Seattle police did anything wrong by putting Vázquez in Singh’s cab.

“The goal of law enforcement at that venue was getting him home. There was no lawful reason to detain him,” said State Patrol spokesman Jeff Merrill. “For some particular reason, this guy in this scenario snapped.”

Jennifer Sullivan: 206-464-8294 or jensullivan@seattletimes.com

WASHINGTON - Pat Nagel built model airplanes and had all the aviation books she could handle as a little girl in the 1930s. She pursued her passion as a flight attendant and as a docent for the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

Now 80, she has been a valuable source of expertise for museum curators of the new exhibit “America by Air,” which opened Saturday at the Washington, D.C. museum. Nagel, an American Airlines attendant from 1950 to 1952, was able to explain the purpose of a mysterious compartment on the DC-7 aircraft: It was used for dog crates.

“We were stewardesses. We were not flight attendants,” said Nagel, who will gives tours each week. “People said it was like being a movie star, but get this, movie stars had their pictures taken with us!”

It will be hard to miss one of the newest additions to the museum. The front section of a huge Boeing 747 airliner from Northwest Airlines pokes its nose into the new gallery, which curators spent more than five years developing. The exhibit traces the history of passenger air travel from its very beginning: the early attempts to start up airlines just a decade after the Wright brothers made the first flight at Kitty Hawk, N.C., in 1903.

Interactive exhibits depict the early air service developed to carry U.S. mail and later wealthy business travelers, the coming of the jet age and the airlines’ struggles after the government deregulated the industry in 1978.

“In the span of less than 70 years, we’ve gone from tiny little airplanes to full-blown, massive, million-pound airliners carrying a billion people around the planet a year,” said aeronautics curator Robert van der Linden.

The first passengers to fly across the country paid about $300, he said. The price is about the same today.

“That has never changed. It’s just what that $300 could buy. In 1930, you could buy an automobile (for $300),” van der Linden said.

The permanent exhibit is the first major gallery to be updated in several years. Attendance has been more sluggish ever since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, but it still averages about 27,000 people a day, said museum director Jack Dailey, a retired Marine Corps general and former NASA administrator.

Touch screens, simulations of 1920s airmail flights and a Web site that allows visitors to contribute their memories of airline travel are among the new additions designed to reach a younger generation of museum visitors.

A section on the qualifications for stewardesses shows the strict requirements women such as Nagel had to meet. Single women only, not divorced. Ages 21 to 26. The maximum weight was 135 pounds.

Because the government set airfare rates, the airlines used amenities to attract passengers. At least one ad campaign focused on the “pretty girls” aboard each flight.

“You could imagine we were all sure we were heaven’s gift to aviation,” Nagel said, adding that she loved serving passengers. “It was my airplane. It was like they were guests in my house.”

KABUL, Afghanistan - The fields of Balkh province in northern Afghanistan were free of opium poppies this year, a success touted often by Afghan and international officials. But one look at Mohammad Alam’s fields uncovers an emerging drug problem.

Ten-foot-tall cannabis plants flourish in Alam’s fields. The crop - the source of both marijuana and hashish - can be just as profitable as opium but draws none of the scrutiny from Afghan officials bent on eradicating poppies.

Cannabis cultivation rose 40 percent in Afghanistan this year, to 173,000 acres from 123,550 in 2006, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime estimated in its 2007 opium survey. The crop is being grown in at least 18 of Afghanistan’s 34 provinces, according to the survey released last month.

“The government cannot provide a good market for other crops like cotton, watermelon and vegetables, so I have to grow marijuana instead of poppy,” said Alam, a farmer in Balkh province, which the U.N. singles out as a “leading example” of an opium-free area.

Gen. Khodaidad, Afghanistan’s acting counter-narcotics minister, said the government doesn’t yet have a good handle on marijuana.

“This is also a big problem for Afghanistan,” said Khodaidad, who like many Afghans uses one name. “It is very cheap. Hashish is more harmful (than poppies) to the people of Afghanistan.”

The U.N. said cannabis yields around twice the quantity of drug per acre as opium poppies and requires less investment. The U.N. drug report estimated farmers growing cannabis could earn the same amount per acre as opium farmers.

“As a consequence, farmers who do not cultivate opium poppy may turn to cannabis cultivation,” the report said.

Afghanistan already grows some 93 percent of the world’s opium.

It could be a reaction to incompetence, unfairness, work overload. It could be from a thousand daily cuts that bleed your enthusiasm for your job. It could be one major incident - a layoff, a demotion or someone else’s promotion.

So you blow your top at work.

Wrath is one of the original seven deadly sins - but in today’s workplace, displaying anger is just not acceptable.

Let’s see how you can tame that tiger.

Our primordial roots

Being tagged as a screamer used to be a sign of macho, a signal that you were demanding better performance or telling management to shove it. Think of apes baring their teeth at the competition - it’s an age-old move to make others back down.

Sadly, it worked. Who wants to bring up a controversial work issue with a colleague who has a reputation for exploding?

That has radically changed. One of the key requirements for management candidates these days is an ability to stay calm and focused even in the most tumultuous circumstances. Anyone still yelling over daily work issues is considered a liability lawsuit waiting to happen.

“More and more companies are recognizing how an angry person negatively affects their workplace,” said W. Barry Nixon, executive director of the National Institute for the Prevention of Workplace Violence (www.workplaceviolence911.com).

Studies show that people get angry once or twice a week on average, with men getting more intensely angry and women staying angry longer, according to W. Doyle Gentry, author of “Anger Management for Dummies.”

And contrary to stereotypes, younger workers display more anger than older ones, because people have better control over their emotions as they age, Gentry notes.

Anger also is linked to all sorts of health issues - increased blood pressure, blood sugar and heart rates, to start - no matter whether you are screaming at others or seething inside.

When to rein it in

If you don’t know quite why you are angry, you cannot get rid of the anger. And if work is making you angry, the situation is going to get worse, not better, unless you take action. You need to unroot the sources of your anger, disable those triggers and then practice new patterns of behavior that do not include exploding at others.

“How we deal with anger is a learned behavior - it is not innate. Sometimes we need to ‘unlearn,’ ” Nixon said. “Anger-management courses are good from a prevention standpoint, but if an individual has challenges, they need one-on-one coaching.”

You also need to beware of “righteous anger” - you may be right on a certain topic, but the effects of your outburst will linger long after everyone has forgotten the issue itself.

When you’re the target

Anger comes out in all different ways, including verbal abuse, bullying, sabotage and physical violence, all of which can affect your ability to do your job. Retaliation from you is only going to escalate the problem.

Your company has a legal obligation to prevent a hostile workplace, so if going to your supervisor about a colleague’s anger doesn’t solve anything, go to your human resources department. Unfortunately, that does not always work, either.

“In a company that listens to employees and takes their concerns seriously, HR is the place to go to,” Nixon said. “But in companies where managers are yellers and HR is weak, they might even make you the problem.”

Mad for a time

Sometimes anger is tied to a specific time - Monday morning, Thursday afternoon, tax season, back-to-school season. This is your subconscious at work - listen to it!

Monday morning anger: You find no pleasure at work. Time to look for another job, another company or even another industry. Note: This is anger, not ordinary Monday-morning moodiness.

Thursday afternoon anger: You dislike one major part of your job, which boils over at a certain time every week. Maybe there are ways this task can be done more efficiently, maybe it’s an impossible task to begin with - or maybe someone else could do it, possibly better than you.

Tax season, back-to-school time: You like your job but dislike its heavy-pressure moments. You cannot eliminate all of the last-minute stress, but more intensive preparations could make the time go smoother.

Danger! Danger!

“Going postal” is now an indelible phrase in the U.S. lexicon, but it’s an extreme situation that the vast majority of workers will never encounter. Still, even the idea that a co-worker could physically hurt you is enough to make anyone pause.

In 2006, 441 people were killed and 15,000 injured in physical attacks at work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Nixon says about 25-30 percent of those were from co-worker violence (most others were from robberies).

A study by Hand-Gun Free America, an advocacy group, found that 92 percent of those who used a gun on others at work were male, most knew their victims and over half had just experienced a “negative change in employment” - being laid off, fired or demoted.

Many attackers exhibited warning signs that were ignored by managers and colleagues, Nixon said.

His top warning signs include: People who make threats; who are constantly confrontational; who are fascinated by weapons and violence; who are in desperate financial or emotional circumstances; who have substance-abuse problems, deep depression or extreme obsessions.

“Dismissing anger is a major problem. People notice a change in behavior, but the light bulb doesn’t go off and connect the dots,” Nixon said.

WASHINGTON - Sen. Trent Lott, a 35-year Capitol Hill veteran who staged a political comeback after losing his Senate leadership post because of racially insensitive remarks, plans to resign by year’s end.

By resigning, the Senate’s No. 2 Republican will avoid an ethics rule that takes effect by the end of the year, allowing him to pursue a lucrative lobbying job after a year’s wait rather than after two years.

The Mississippi senator is the latest veteran GOP lawmaker to announce plans to depart Congress after the party lost its majority to Democrats in the 2006 election. Former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert quit Monday night.

Lott is the sixth GOP senator to announce plans to leave the divided chamber, which is mired in partisan conflict that is expected to worsen as the 2008 campaign heats up.

“We’ve had this great experience for these 35 years, but we do think that there is time left for us to maybe do something else,” Lott said of the decision he made with his wife, Tricia. Lott, who was elected to the House in 1972 and moved to the Senate in 1988, said he had no health problems.

But the timing of his departure fueled speculation that Lott, 66, was leaving to join the parade of former lawmakers who turn to lobbying to cash in on their experience and connections.

An ethics bill passed by Congress and signed by President Bush this year doubles, to two years, the “cooling-off” period senators must wait after leaving Capitol Hill before they can lobby their former colleagues.

While Democrats face an uphill battle to capture Lott’s seat, his departure is a symbolically deeper wound to Republicans. Lott has served as a member of either the House or Senate Republican leadership for 19 of the past 27 years, and he is leaving midterm after winning his fourth six-year term last November.

“If I were 20 years younger, I’d be mounting my horse saying, ‘Let’s get this majority back,’ ” Lott said in his hometown of Pascagoula, Miss.

In the post-World War II era, only two senators have left midterm for life in the private sector, according to the Senate Historian’s Office. David Boren, D-Okla., became a university president in 1994 and Albert “Happy” Chandler, D-Ky., left the Senate to become commissioner of Major League Baseball in 1945. Others who left midterm moved to other public posts or were driven from office by scandal.

Lott’s departure is equally stunning because of his political comeback after allegations of racial insensitivity drove him from the leadership.

Poised to become majority leader, Lott praised Sen. Strom Thurmond’s 1948 segregationist presidential campaign at a 100th birthday party and retirement celebration for the South Carolina Republican in December 2002, saying the nation would not have “all these problems” if Thurmond had been elected. With the blessing of the Bush White House, Republicans banished Lott from the leadership.

Lott spent four years as a backbench Republican, burnishing his image as a behind-the-scenes dealmaker. By the end of 2005 - a year in which his mother died and his Pascagoula home was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina - he planned to announce his retirement rather than seek re-election, he said. But Lott cited the need to help his state recover from Katrina, cruised to a re-election victory and threw himself last fall into a hotly contested bid for minority whip, winning by one vote.

That left the impression that he would remain in the chamber, and part of its leadership.

But Lott’s bipartisan skills have not been in high demand this past year, as the legislative agenda has nearly ground to a halt in a partisan standoff on issues ranging from the Iraq war to immigration reform.

“I think it was a surprise that it came right now, this soon,” said Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., Lott’s vote-counting deputy. “He just sort of reached the end of the line in terms of what he can do here. It’s kind of the cumulative effect of 39 years of wear and tear.”

The GOP departures have been a blow to Republican hopes of regaining their majority. With Lott’s departure, the GOP must defend 23 seats next year compared with 12 for Democrats.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said that once Lott resigns, he will appoint a successor to serve until an election is held next year. Republican Reps. Charles “Chip” Pickering and Roger Wicker are considered possible successors. Among Democrats, former Attorney General Mike Moore is mentioned as a possible candidate next year.

Suggesting that all good things must come to an end, Washington State terminated the five-year tenure of football coach Bill Doba on Monday. Since Doba swore he wouldn’t quit, we’ll take him at his word and presume he was fired, becoming the first football coach cashiered at the school since Bert Clark in 1967.

You could conclude that college football 2007 has officially gone daft. The Cougars just fired a coach for having a winning record, while Washington, once the dreadnought of the West Coast, is apparently OK with Tyrone Willingham going 11-24 in three seasons.

Way back when the Cougars excised Clark, they did it partly because he made some unwise remarks after a thrashing at Stanford, to the effect that he wasn’t certain the Cougars could compete in the old Pac-8 Conference.

The autopsy on Doba: He was fired for being too nice.

Principally, that meant he was willing to delegate major authority to his assistant coaches. He trusted all of them, some too much.

Remember, Doba was hired by WSU at 62, after Mike Price announced in December 2002 he was leaving for Alabama. Doba hadn’t been a head coach since 1976 - when he was guiding Mishawaka High School in Indiana. While there’s no statute against a college head coach having success in his 60s, just about everybody who’s having it established himself in a head position before then.

My sense is that Doba, comfortable in an assistant’s cocoon for 14 seasons under Price, was taken aback by the breadth of a head coach’s responsibilities.

So whenever he could, he delegated. For the most part, he concerned himself with the defense and gave great leeway to the offensive coaches. This fall, he became fond of saying, “Alex Brink knows this offense better than I do.” That may have been true, which is both reassuring and alarming.

His assistants had to love him. They got a long leash, multiyear contracts and peace of mind.

In a conversation four weeks ago, Doba told me, “I want [the assistant] to come to work and be able to relax and say something during the staff meeting and not get his head kicked in. I’ve been in situations where you wonder, ‘What’s gonna go wrong today?’ I don’t want that kind of pressure.

“Some people enjoy making other people miserable - and some are very successful and winning games. That’s not me.”

Which is fine, but ultimately, the head coach has to have a vision. He needs to know every nuance of the offense just as he knows the defense. At WSU, you can’t be a caretaker; you’ve got to be a swashbuckler.

A person who would know says Doba came to rely too much on certain assistants’ opinions on matters such as which recruits could overcome academic hurdles. Time and again the past couple of years, WSU lost prospects who couldn’t get in or who flunked out.

Inevitably, that began taking a toll on the field - in depth, for one. Washington State special teams were mostly a disaster. The Cougars’ Apple Cup victory over Washington is all the more impressive when you consider UW seemed to start every possession on its 43-yard line after a WSU kickoff.

Too often the past couple of years, the Cougars, ironically, were done in by their defense, Doba’s particular expertise. If it wasn’t that, it was a maddening series of botched trick plays - from the misbegotten 2-yard onside kick to start the 2004 game against USC, to a cavalcade of failed fake punts. Those are the kinds of plays that, right or wrong, focus attention on a staff’s preparation.

To the end, Doba was a gentleman to the core. After the Cougars presented him a glittering going-away gift - Saturday’s 42-35 victory over Washington - Doba talked about what a classy rivalry it was and hugged Huskies staffers outside the WSU dressing quarters.

Just a guess, but what WSU faithful would really like now is some of the Dennis Erickson fire of 1987 (”Before I go to bed every night, I’m going to ask myself: What did I do today to beat the Huskies?”). Or that of his predecessor, Jim Walden, who last week in an Internet piece noted some tepid performances of recent, favored WSU teams against UW and said, “I’m talking about really uninspired performances. When I was coaching, that would have been a sacrilege.”

Now, WSU needs somebody to rally the troops in and out of the program, to embrace every last facet of the job, not delegate it, and to persuade boosters to surrender their billfolds in the name of WSU’s stadium renovation.

Some history, ancient though it may be: When WSU fired Clark in 1967, it hired a hard-drinking, swaggering Irishman named Jim Sweeney. He used to fling off his sports jacket in front of basketball crowds and lead a Cougars spell-out. He could sell fur coats in Fort Lauderdale.

One of his signature victories came over Oregon in 1971 in Spokane. The defining play came when WSU, in punt formation, had an upback slip the ball forward between the legs of a halfback named Bernard Jackson, who that day set a school rushing record with 261 yards.

Jackson scored on a 46-yard run on that little ploy. Oregon still hasn’t figured out who had the ball.

So today, the question: Where was Bernard Jackson when Bill Doba needed him?

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com

OLYMPIA - State lawmakers during a special session Thursday will consider helping struggling homeowners by letting households earning up to $57,000 a year defer part of their property tax.

Gov. Christine Gregoire called the special session to reinstate a 1 percent cap on property-tax increases that was recently thrown out by the state Supreme Court.

The governor on Monday outlined a second measure that would let some homeowners who meet income guidelines defer up to 25 percent of their annual property-tax bill, with restrictions. Copies of the legislation weren’t available.

The governor noted the deferral would be temporary. “When the house is sold, the state will be reimbursed,” she said.

Homeowners also would have to pay interest on the deferred tax. The interest would be based on federal rates. Gregoire said people would pay about 7 percent interest currently.

Democratic leaders in the House and Senate support the proposal. Their party holds large majorities in both chambers.

But Senate Republican Leader Mike Hewitt, R-Walla Walla, wasn’t impressed with the idea, noting the hefty interest. “I don’t know what it’s going to do for people,” he said. “I’m not particularly fond of deferrals.”

House Majority Leader Lynn Kessler, D-Hoquiam, said the measure could help some people in a bind keep their house. She said the income cap would be high enough to help the middle class.

The cutoff of $57,000 is roughly the current median household income in Washington. The state estimates about 7,500 people would take advantage of the program. Gregoire said local governments would not lose any money because the state would cover the lost revenue.

The Senate is expected to take up the bill first. Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, D-Spokane, said she’s hopeful it will pass. “I think there’ll be widespread support for it,” she said.

Gregoire said she expects the 1 percent cap on property taxes to be reinstated by the Legislature, noting that “there is absolute agreement” among Democratic and Republican leaders in the House and Senate.

Voters in 2001 overwhelmingly approved Initiative 747, a Tim Eyman-sponsored measure that limited increases in property-tax collections to 1 percent a year. The state estimates the cap has saved taxpayers more than $1.6 billion since it was put in place.

Earlier this month, the state Supreme Court overturned I-747. In its 5-4 decision, the court said the tax cap is invalid because people were not fully informed about what they were voting on.

Without a new cap, local governments could begin increasing their annual property-tax collections by as much as 6 percent - the amount the law allowed before I-747.

The court ruling sparked an uproar among Eyman, Republican lawmakers and Dino Rossi, the GOP candidate for governor. They called on Gregoire and the Democrat-controlled Legislature to convene a special session to immediately reinstate the 1 percent cap.

Gregoire has urged local governments to continue heeding the 1 percent cap. The governor said Monday that she decided to call the Legislature into session because a handful of local governments said they planned to take advantage of the Supreme Court decision and raise taxes above the cap.

“I’d hoped that local governments would feel as I did. They couldn’t give me the guarantee, and that was the tipping point,” she said.

Gregoire noted that I-747 was overwhelmingly approved by voters. “So I think the people of the state of Washington made their point,” she said. “I’m not putting my opinion instead of the local governments’. I’m just saying the will of the voters has to be carried out.”

Andrew Garber: 360-943-9882 or agarber@seattletimes.com.

Seattle Times reporter David Postman contributed to this story.

SAN FRANCISCO - Prosecutors argued Monday that a former Brocade Communications Systems executive was a key enforcer in an illegal accounting scheme, while her attorney said she was just following instructions when she backdated stock options.

Stephanie Jensen, Brocade’s former vice president of human resources, went on trial Monday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on felony charges of conspiracy and falsifying corporate records. If convicted, she faces up to 25 years in prison.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Adam Reeves said Jensen instructed her staff to choose favorable dates in the past for stock-option awards and warned them never to communicate by e-mail about the company’s stock-option activities.

Reeves said Jensen directed and enforced the practices and knew they were illegal.

“She deliberately falsified Brocade’s options-grant records and carefully tried to cover up her scheme so that the auditors, the company’s watchdogs, would never know what happened,” Reeves said. “It was simple, it was ingenious and it was a total fraud.”

Jensen’s lawyer said her client implemented policies already in place when she joined Brocade.

“This is not her scheme, this is not her idea, this is a process the company used and she followed,” lawyer Jan Little said.

Jensen, 50, sat with her hands clasped and looked at the judge and the jury.

Little said Jensen doesn’t have a finance background and didn’t know San Jose-based Brocade wasn’t properly recording compensation charges for options. Prosecutors contend those omissions distorted the picture investors saw of the company’s profitability.

Jensen “never for one second thought those documents were false, or wrong or illegal,” Little said.

Brocade makes switches used to connect corporate servers and data-storage systems. With a booming stock price and hot technology during the dot-com heyday, the company was in a fierce battle for engineering and sales talent when the alleged offenses occurred between 2000 and 2004.

Jensen is the second person to go on trial for alleged stock-options malfeasance since the Justice Department began probing allegations of options backdating at more than 100 companies.

Her former boss, former Brocade Chief Executive Gregory Reyes, was convicted in August on 10 counts of securities fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison. A sentencing date has not been set.

At least 10 executives at several companies have been criminally charged as a result of federal options probes.

The scandal has prompted hundreds of businesses to review their financial records and some to wipe out hundreds of millions of dollars in previously reported profits to account properly for options-related charges.

Jensen, whose office processed all the paperwork for new hires, is accused of changing the dates on offer letters and other documents to make it appear that prized new workers were hired and granted options before their actual hire date. The practice makes the options more valuable because they have appreciated more by the time the employees exercised them.

Backdating options isn’t illegal, but companies must properly account for it. And if the amount an employee can pay for the stock is below the trading price on the day the options were granted, the company must absorb charges for that difference, which can be substantial.

Prosecutor Reeves said Monday that while Reyes bears a heavy responsibility for the scheme, Jensen was the “key person who ensured that the details of this fraud were carried out as they were.”

Jensen was originally charged with eight felonies, but the government unexpectedly dropped six charges, including the more serious allegations of securities fraud. She is now charged with conspiracy to falsify records and falsifying records.

Two former human-resources employees who worked under Jensen testified Monday about company procedures. The trial is expected to last two to three weeks.

NORTH BEND - Snow and ice caused a rash of problems Monday night and early today for motorists through the Cascade Range and in parts of Eastern Washington.

A heavy snow warning was issued by the National Weather Service for up to 10 inches in Walla Walla by tonight.

Interstate 90 was closed to eastbound traffic Monday evening at North Bend because of accidents and spinouts, and Interstate 82 in Yakima was closed in both directions for the same reason. Both freeways were reopened overnight, and all highway passes were open in the morning.

Four people were taken to hospitals after a rollover late Monday in Yakima, and two were listed in serious condition,

In Spokane city and county, where about 2 inches of snow fell overnight, the State Patrol reported 14 crashes on highways and I-90, and local authorities reported about a dozen other crashes and spinouts.

Icy U.S. Highway 97 was almost entirely blocked by a semi that went onto its side nine miles south of Goldendale Monday night.

Several tractor-trailer rigs were disabled on U.S. 195 this morning in Whitman County, troopers reported.