Guest column by Joshua Marquis
Bend Bulletin
April 2, 2023
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One of the best and most common sense gun laws we have prevents felons from legally buying a firearm.

Yet Oregon state Sen. James Manning, D-Eugene, in an op-ed published on March 14 in the Bulletin, urged support for automatically expunging criminal records for many serious crimes — as if they never happened. Good news if you’re a felon and want to legally buy a gun.

Manning calls Senate Bill 698 a “second chance” for criminal offenders. I call it bad legislation, particularly at a time when Oregonians are on edge over gun violence.
More than anything, S.B. 698 is an insult to all crime victims.

If your family member was killed by a drunken driver, or your good credit history destroyed by an identity thief, or the security of your home violated by a burglar — those offenses will live on in your life. While some supporters claim they will “later amend the bill” as it currently stands, it will “auto-erase” crimes like rape in the second degree, and sexual abuse in the first degree. As currently drafted, this legislation would “auto expunge” the crime of a 40-year old man who sexually molests a 13-year-old!

But under S.B. 698, the offender is automatically forgiven, presumably so he or she can get on with their lives. They don’t even have to suffer a guilty conscience. It’s like they have a constitutional right to be forgiven.

If passed, this bill will automatically expunge over 90% of all criminal convictions by my calculation, including crimes such as manslaughter, sexual abuse, domestic violence, burglary. It is estimated that as many as 300,000 offenders convicted of misdemeanors and most felonies could benefit from this legislation.

Expungements already exist. In fact, as a former district attorney, I signed off on many expungements. However, this bill does not even require the person with a felony record to go through the basic process by applying, getting fingerprinted and submitting an affidavit to a judge to which the local DA and the victim could respond. (The fingerprint requirement enables the courts to know if the person already has a long criminal record.)

Manning’s bill also would waive all fees paid by the offender and create an unprecedented system that could be accurately termed as “automatic expungement.”

The Oregon Justice Department would identify which crimes qualified for expungement and make them automatic.

Mannig co-authored his op-ed with former Georgia Congressman Doug Collins, a Republican, and sought to strike a bipartisan tone. They also shared a military connection — Manning a former military officer and Collins a former Air Force chaplain.

They said the military would dole out “tough accountability” for “poor behavior” and then give service members a second chance. They suggested that the civilian criminal justice system should be equally generous with second chances.

They ignore that many of the crimes that would be automatically expunged under S.B. 698 are far more serious than mere “poor behavior.” They also don’t appreciate how many crimes in the civilian world — especially in Oregon — don’t result in tough accountability. There are criminal offenders in this state who suffer few consequences.
In fact, offenders have been the recipients of the legislature’s increasingly progressive criminal justice reforms.

If Senate Bill 698 passes, Oregon will have one of the most radical versions of “expungements” that exist anywhere in the United States. It represents a repudiation of any progress that has been made in truth in sentencing or victims rights.

​Now, we are facing a law, that if passed, would make Oregon the single most felon-friendly state in America for wiping out serious criminal convictions.

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Guest Column: Bill in the Legislature is an insult to crime victims | Opinion | bendbulletin.com

Guest column by Joshua Marquis
Bend Bulletin, 3 November 2021

The initiative and referendum system was introduced by an obscure Oregon politician, Willian U’Ren. It’s been copied across the nation, allowing the people to decide important issues through direct votes.

It was used in 1914 to vote out the death penalty that Oregon had adopted shortly after the Civil War, in 1864. In 1920, voters reinstated it, and it stayed in effect until 1964, when Oregon became the last state, to date, to abolish the death penalty by vote of the people. In 1978 and again in 1984 voters made clear they wanted the penalty back.

Since then there have been many attempts to get voters to abolish capital punishment — all have failed, including two efforts in blue California in the last decade, and one in red Nebraska. This is not a classic liberal/conservative or Democrat/Republican issue.

Death row was abolished by Gov. Kate Brown earlier this year, and this month the Oregon Supreme Court reversed all but perhaps four of the 31 remaining inmates who had received a death sentence. The court based its decision, in theory, on 2019 legislation in Senate Bill 1013, sponsored by avowed enemies of the death penalty who knew they could never muster the legislative votes to overturn the people. Supporters and sponsors claimed the bill was nothing more than a cleanup of a messy law, that narrowed eligible murders to a tiny number of highly improbable murders (organized terrorists killing multiple victims).

Passage of SB 1013 required a major political sleight of hand by then-Rep. Jennifer Williamson and Sen. Floyd Prozanski, who specifically promised skeptical colleagues the bill would apply only to future cases. Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum’s office and Gov. Brown joined the chorus of deceit. After SB 1013 passed, Rosenblum’s office announced: the law would be retroactive. Brown continued to equivocate, promising to call a special session to consider the matter. She never did.

Christian Longo drowned his wife and young children in Newport. Dayton Leroy Rogers is a serial killer with six known victims. Randy Guzek murdered Rod and Lois Houser in Terrebonne in 1987. He’s been sentenced to death by four different Deschutes County juries over a 22-year period. None of these killers will ever receive their sentences. The supporters of SB 1013, now law, implied those murders just weren’t “bad enough.” The Oregon Supreme Court echoed that claim by saying murders like these three “do not fall within the narrow category of conduct that can be punished by death, as opposed to lesser sentences...”

Oregon executed two men in the mid-1990s, and they were “volunteers.” Under current law, killing two or even 20 people doesn’t qualify for the death penalty unless the murder was carried out by members of an organized terrorist group.

Tim McVeigh’s killing of 168 people in the Oklahoma City bombing would not qualify in Oregon.

The state Supreme Court’s decision cannot be appealed to the federal courts because its decision wasn’t based on the federal ban on cruel and unusual punishment. It was based on a state provision that is written identically to federal law, but interpreted in a way that resembles “states’ rights” — claims of the last century that allowed the depravities of slavery and various forms of discrimination.

Randy Guzek will be eligible for parole as soon as the parole board dockets his case. He’s eligible because at the time of his murders the only other sentence was life with a minimum of 30 years, and he completed his 30 about four years ago. The current district attorney showed up at the 2019 parole hearing for Mark Wilson, who was Guzek’s co-killer. John Hummel astonished the Houser family by announcing he supported granting parole for Wilson, who had agreed to a 40-year minimum.

The parole board has thus far ignored Hummel’s recommendation. Perhaps it will ignore Guzek, but the board is working with a different law now. If you don’t want to see him or the other killers released, write your district attorney and the governor.

Some people have moral, religious, or political reasons for opposing the death penalty. National polling in 2021 by Pew Research Center revealed that more than 60% of Americans continue to support the penalty. 
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What do Oregonians think? Why not ask them, instead of engaging in trickery and deceit?

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This is a sad coda by a State Supreme Court unwilling to accept the will of the people or the decisions of the US Supreme Court (not just recently, but for 50 years) that the death penalty is constitutional if voters of a state want it available.

The court endorsed the sleazy move by largely Democratic legislators in 2019 to neuter the death penalty, because they could do that without the 2/3rds votes they didn’t have.
Sen. Johnson and Rep. Witt voted AGAINST SB 1013, so please thank them.
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Some of these news stories are fuzzy. The result is all current death sentences will be vacated and the killers sentenced to life, either true life, or in about 4 cases, including Randy Guzek, who I tried three times, will get an immediate chance of parole.

Dave Houser is the son in law of Rod and Lois Houser, the couple gunned down by Randy Guzek. This is a travesty of justice. Essentially the elites of the Democratic Party (and some Republicans) know they don’t have the votes to overturn repeated votes for a limited death penalty. So the trick is to “limit” it, without full abolition, which would require voter approval.

The Court invoked the Oregon constitution, which although is identically worded to the federal constitution, allows the state Supreme Court to invoke “independent state grounds,” which is little different from southern states in the 1960s claiming “states’ rights” to try to evade federal civil rights laws.
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To respond to one anonymous troll on the KTVZ site, he cannot receive any other sentence than one that gives him immediate parole eligibility because that was the only alternative sentence in 1988.

People should write my successor, DA Ron Brown, and Governor Kate Brown to express their horror at the attempt by Jesse McAllister to get his sentence commuted. He murdered Brook Goza and Frank Nimitz on the Seaside beach in July 1997. He and co-defendant Brad Price fled to Mexico for a year. When McAllister was arraigned I was ready to seek the death penalty, but he offered to plead straight up to True Life, no possibility of parole.