1 / GUTTING MEASURE 11
The vile duplicity headed by Speaker Kotek, abetted by catatonic Uncle Peter and until recently orchestrated by Jennifer Williamson, is truly disturbing. All the worse because the Oregonian, OPB and other of the larger news mediums either fail to cover their actions or have adopted such obviously biased and "woke" narratives that it would be funny if it weren't so serious. First were massive changes to criminal sentencing very late in the session and all pre-cooked. Measure 11 was first passed by a citizen-based group without either the endorsement or the opposition of the state's DAs. It was under constant assault for six years, culminating in Measure 94, led by many major lights who like to call themselves "progressives" (the usual suspects, including Floyd Prozanski, Joann Hardesty, Bowman, Chip Shields, etc), who put together a slick and well-funded campaign in 2000. This time most DAs, myself among the most outspoken, pushed back hard. We even got different reporters and editors (than now) to do a story about how many of the "real scenarios" supposedly showcasing terrible injustice under M11 were in fact either totally made up, or from other states with different laws. Measure 94 was defeated by a massive 3 to 1 margin -- 73% to 27%, a fact NEVER mentioned in today's stories that seek to tie the measure to as distant a past as possible and assign to Kevin Mannix all credit and blame. Measure 11 automatically "remanded" juvenile killers and rapists into adult court. If the offender was 17 when convicted, they could serve their entire sentence at the Oregon Youth Authority and never see the inside of the State Prison. There were two exceptions -- one for manslaughter in the first degree, for which the juvenile would be sentenced a minimum of 10 years; and one for murder, with a minimum sentence of 25 years. Either of those two convictions would eventually send the 17-year-old to State Prison. The law also went a long way toward erasing racial and economic inequities. White, upper-middle-class judges had previously been far more willing to grant probation to someone who looked like their son than to the poor Hispanic convicted of the same serious felony. Oh, and crime plummeted under M-11 at rates even higher than other parts of America. Capital punishment, while always controversial, was used exceedingly sparingly by prosecutors and even more so by juries. Oregon's small death row was overwhelmingly white and male (with only one woman on it). I I prosecuted at least 10 potential capital murders, sought death in only two cases, and received a jury verdict of death for one defendant, Randy Guzek (at each of three separate trials). Now, move to the 2019 session. No more Hardy Myers as AG to advocate for victims. The Oregon Police Chiefs (OACP) and Sheriffs (OSSA) completely sold out in exchange for big salaries and anti-police union legislation. Oregon District Attorneys' (ODAA) "leadership" simply avoided all controversy. The legislature scheduled "Invited Testimony Only" hearings, packed with the same opponents to Measure 11 as 20 years ago, this time concentrating on the juvenile aspect. There was virtually no real debate. I watched every minute of the hearings, the debate and the vote. The legislature needed a two-thirds majority to change the constitution. So, in exchange for the exact number of votes needed to overturn M-11, Kotek, Courtney, et.al. promised four GOP legislators from rural Oregon various gifts on the infamous Christmas Tree bill. In a stunning "Please don't throw me in the briar patch" speech, GOP leader Mike McLane (R-District 55) appeared to deliberately throw the vote. He gave the vaguest of lip service to "what the ODAA wanted," a phrase calculated to inflame legislators who loathed DAs. McLane didn't vote for the repeal, but he guided in the missile and delivered the coup de grace. McLane resigned his House seat just days later, in July 2019, after five terms, to accept an appointment by Gov. Brown to Circuit Court Judge for Crook and Jefferson counties. Records show McLane was exempted from the usual application process, so didn't have to compete with those who actually filed and were interviewed. Coincidence? The whole debate was a farce. Kotek and Williamson had pre-purchased four Republicans, all from districts that had reaffirmed by 4 to 1 or greater their constituents' support for Measure 11, putting a quick end to the 25-year-old reform measure. Yes, Measure 11 was a reform, a leveling of the field, a truth in sentencing measure that gave victims a seat at the table. With M-11 was toast, because much of the constitutional amendment had been "broken" by a two-thirds vote, most legal scholars, myself, believe that the adult part of Measure 11 -- which requires rapists actually serve 8 years, child molesters serve 5, and murderers serve 25 -- can be killed off by a simple majority vote in the 2021 session. If not sooner, given this legislature's zeal to expand one-day special sessions to settle old political scores. ### PART 2 : GUTTING THE DEATH PENALTY Mary Ann Murk, an attorney in Astoria, Oregon, is probably the best and savviest advocate a person facing a mental commitment could have. She writes honestly about the cruelty that some allegedly mentally ill persons are subjected to, and the costs of and emotional burden to the law enforcement officers charged with finding some place for the person to land. These people haven’t been charged with a crime. Their victims are often family members who want them to get help, not spend time in jail. Oregon’s law on allegedly mentally ill persons (colloquially known as AMIPs) has nothing to do with legal insanity or being unfit to stand for trial. The mental commitment process isn’t part of the criminal code. It’s an attempt to provide a constitutional structure for people suffering such severe mental illness that they pose an immediate physical threat to themselves or others, or who won’t provide for such a basic need as eating.
These cases are heartbreaking. They are usually brought by concerned family members, rarely by the cops, never by the district attorney’s office. Here’s a fairly typical example: A family member repeatedly calls Clatsop Behavioral Healthcare (CBH) because their adult son is convinced outside governments are communicating with him through microwaves that only he can hear. One day he threatens to blow up a local government building to stop the voices. He yells, screams, takes out the kitchen knives and begins cutting himself. A crime hasn’t been committed. The police won’t engage, even if the family says they’re afraid of what the son might do. CBH will send one or two case workers to assess the situation and write a report. If they believe the son meets the qualifications, CBH will apply to the court for an order. If the judge believes the person qualifies under Oregon law, she will sign a warrant of detention. At this point the sheriff’s office is delegated the responsibility of transporting the person to whatever mental hospital between Coos Bay and the Idaho border is available. Let’s say the person is “decompensating” -- falling apart -- in a store. Making a terrible and frightening scene but not destroying any property. The store is likely to call the police. The police will likely come to ensure a crime hasn’t taken place. This is one of the social services we’ve come to expect the police to provide. They will try to “de-escalate,” or calm down, the person, and possibly suggest he leave the store. Police are trained in de-escalation. The officer is there to make sure no one is getting hurt and that the guy doesn’t have a weapon. Once the officer has assured that, she will call CBH to have that agency come and assess the person. Often CBH doesn’t or can’t immediately respond, so the officer has to stay around to make sure the person is safe and that the situation doesn’t escalate. If the officer can articulate an imminent danger, she can hold the person temporarily, usually in the back of the police car, until CBH arrives. There are many scenarios. Some are worse -- for everyone -- than others. The important point here is that police don’t investigate and make judgments about mental illness. Mental health workers do. The budget of CBH is larger than the sheriff’s office and the district attorney’s office combined. (All CBH funding comes from the state and some federal sources.) And yet we definitely need more funding for mental health. We also need the police, and probably more funding for them, at least in Astoria. I can guarantee you that if a family member calls CBH and says their son has lost his mind and is waving a butcher knife around, CBH is going to call the police, and wait for officers to respond before going in themselves. (That’s one other reason why officers wear 40-pound vests: to prevent themselves from being stabbed in the chest.) No mental health facility for those who need temporary commitment is available anywhere on the north coast. Semi-independent housing was closed years ago. Drop-in crisis services have been dramatically reduced. Neither our hospitals nor our jail have a room for people whose primary issue is acute mental illness (despite years of attempting to convince both CMH and Providence Seaside to do so.) The Oregon State Hospital was massively downsized over a decade ago. The only options are within a small patchwork of hospitals ranging from Coos Bay, Corvallis, Portland, and Ontario. A shackled 9-hour ride in the back of a sheriff’s patrol car is demeaning and terrifying, as most of the people are in active psychosis and believe they are being abducted by aliens or sent for medical experiments. They are clearly suffering and usually haven’t committed a crime, and certainly haven’t been charged as yet. Nor should the sheriff have to engage in this sometimes dangerous and almost always unpleasant duty. What can we do? Mandate that all hospitals have the ability to do psychiatric evaluations every day of the week. Create a treatment and evaluation facility close enough to avoid the long ride. Assign transport to a non-police agency. But consider what might happen when the allegedly mentally ill person attacks the driver or bolts the car on the Santiam Pass in mid-winter. Once social workers have the training, legal authority, and desire to run after and restrain someone in the grip of a psychosis, they might as well be police officers. There are many dedicated people working in the field, but we fail the profoundly mentally ill. The police are the least culpable of all. Some proponents of Defund the Police want to refocus how police work is done. Many police departments themselves might welcome this because many consider the proper work of police to be detecting and apprehending criminal suspects, not doing social work. Some proponents, like the city leaders in Minneapolis and Seattle, have made clear they seek abolition. In practical terms that will mean that unless an actual crime is underway, and likely a violent crime, police officers will respond only to purely criminal calls. That, of course, does nothing to avoid confrontations with robbers high on meth, and men with anger management problems who’ve beaten their girlfriend to a bloody pulp. A serious car crash might be ignored absent immediate evidence of drunk driving. Police reforms, treatment of the mentally ill -- these issues should go well beyond politics. The Great Cauliflower, as I’ve often called Reagan, didn’t open the mental institutions on his own. Nor did Nixon. The call to deinstitutionalize came well before either of these conservatives, and arose from more liberal outrage. Ken Kesey’s “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” was published in 1962. In 1963 Kennedy proposed and signed into law the “Community Mental Health Act,” which would have built local mental health facilities to replace institutions. The Act was poorly funded due to the costs of the Vietnam War. Medicaid’s passage in 1965, signed into law by Lyndon Johnson, incentivized moving patients out of institutions. Just as former speaker of the house Tip O’Neill said, “All politics is local.” By extension, so are the solutions. ### "Parole board : Man convicted in Terrebonne couple's 1987 killing must serve 7 more years," by Barney Lerten, published May 11, 2020, 9:52pm, ktvz.com
SALEM, Ore. (KTVZ) -- One of two men convicted in the brutal double-murder of a Terrebonne couple nearly 33 years ago has lost his bid for immediate release from prison, as the state parole board on Monday said he must remain behind bars for nearly seven more years. Late last year, the state Board of Parole and Post-Prison Supervision had cleared the way for the eventual release of Mark Wilson, now 51, by finding he's "likely to be rehabilitated." Wilson was 18 in June of 1987 when he shot Rod Houser, 53, 20 times with a rifle on the front porch of the couple's home in the middle of the night. Co-defendant Randy Guzek shot Lois Houser, 49, with a revolver inside the home after finding her inside screaming at the top of a staircase.restitution or reparations -- and even if they could, that his "recent false accusations against a victim's family member" weigh against such a finding. Authorities said the pair then looted the house and tried to make it look like a cult killing, leaving a Bible on Houser's chest and cutting his neck before fleeing. Wilson confessed and pleaded guilty to aggravated murder and felony murder. He was sentenced in 1988 to two consecutive life terms with the possibility of parole. Guzek was convicted in the killings and remains on Oregon's Death Row. Several members of the victims' family argued Wilson should serve 40 years. The parole board issued a decision Monday that set Wilson's release for Jan. 9, 2027, just shy of 40 years after the killings. In its five-page "action form," the parole board said it did not find Wilson's efforts toward rehabilitation or to help identify other victims of his past burglaries to be restitution or reparations -- and even if they could, that his "recent false accusations against a victim's family member" weigh against such a finding. ---- Wilson decision 2020 Download ----- According to The Oregonian/OregonLive, a lawyer for the family said Wilson falsely claimed Rod Houser's brother was, among other things, an associate of a parole board member. Deschutes County District Attorney John Hummel had drawn criticism from the victim's family for recommending Wilson get parole, though the DA claimed he was only upholding the deal made when Wilson pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against Guzek. Dylan Arthur, the parole board's executive director, told the newspaper Wilson can seek an administrative review of the board's decision, if he believes it violated its own rules. He can also seek a reduction of up to 20 percent of the time he's already served, equal to a little more than six years. But Arthur said he would need the support of prison officials to seek a reduced sentence -- and even if he sought that, 'the board is highly unlikely to give a 20 percent reduction," based on recent cases. Hummel provided to NewsChannel 21 this statement on the decision: "I commend the parole board for the thoughtful and thorough attention they provided to this matter. As I argued in the brief I filed, Mr. Wilson’s request for immediate release should be rejected, and the board did so. "Unfortunately for everyone involved, this is not the end of the matter. Mr. Wilson has a right for an administrative appeal, and if he is not satisfied with the result, he can appeal in the courts. And regardless of the outcomes of those appeals, he is entitled to a review hearing in five years, and then three years after that. "The bottom line is that this ruling does not stop the hell that the Houser and Shirts families continue to endure. Hopefully, though, it brings them a bit of calm for the next few years," Hummel concluded. Former Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis, previously the Deschutes County prosecutor in the Randy Guzek case, as well as his several retrials, called the parole board's decision "utterly unexpected, great news," considering its finding last fall regarding Wilson's potential rehabilitation. Marquis noted that Wilson had agreed to serve 40 years in prison "when he agreed to tell the truth about how he and Randy Guzek slaughtered the Houser family." ### Guest Column by Joshua Marquis
Bend Bulletin April 10, 2019 The only testimony in the Oregon Senate Judiciary Committee last month in opposition to a bill that would functionally abolish capital punishment — was offered by the courageous and sensible district attorney of Lane County, Patty Perlow. She pointed out that voters had repeatedly said “yes” to the death penalty in Oregon, and if there was to be a massive change, the voters should make the call, not legislators. Although I prosecuted Randy Guzek three times in Bend between 1990 and 2010, I am retired and no longer a part of Guzek’s prosecution. The current DA — John Hummel, has never tried a homicide case as a DA and excluded me from participating on behalf of the state of Oregon in the parole process involving Guzek’s co-killer, Mark Wilson. Guzek is the only person from Deschutes County on death row, sentenced for gunning down Rod and Lois Houser in Terrebonne in the summer of 1987. Perhaps someone will ask exactly what Hummel is privately advocating for Guzek? In four separate trials, 48 different Deschutes County jurors unanimously sent Guzek to death row in 1989, 1991, 1997, and 2010. But now official position of the prosecution will not be that of the Houser family, who suffered the loss of their brother/father/mom/grandparent in 1987, but that of a politician who advocates for abolishing capital punishment. The issue is one thing in the abstract, possible future, but very concrete for the too real double murder committed shortly after voters overwhelmingly approved the imposition of capital punishment in 1984. When Hummel testified at Wilson’s Parole Hearing three years ago, he stunned those in attendance by declining to even urge that the Parole Board order Wilson to honor his 1988 plea deal … to serve 40 years (another 8 years) before being eligible for parole in 2028. Wilson stays in prison, for now. If deceptive and intellectually dishonest legislation offered this session by Rep. Mitch Greenlick, D-Portland, passes, the multiple murder of a police officer or a serial killer, all would face only the newly created charge of “Murder in the Second Degree.” This act of legislative legerdemain is intended to bypass the constitutional requirement advocated by DA Perlow, referral to the voters, since voters passed capital punishment in a constitutional referendum. By claiming to “just limit” capital punishment by jurors, it effectively abolishes it … but not quite, without a full and public debate and without a decision by the state’s voters. Guzek, and about five other death row inmates sentenced before 1991 cannot face “true life” sentences since such sentences did not exist when they were convicted, and would be eligible for immediate parole, although it would be by no means automatic. Under Oregon law if capital punishment is retroactively revoked, the maximum sentence is that sentence existing at the time the crime occurred. That could mean near immediate release of a man dozens of Deschutes County jurors decided after long deliberation, should die. Oregon voters first abolished capital punishment in the early years of the 20th century, then a few years later reinstated it. The last time any state’s voters decided to abolish the death penalty was in Oregon in 1964. First in 1977, then in 1984 voters once again decided death should be a possible punishment in a very few of the worst murders. No state in America has voted out capital punishment since Oregon did 55 years ago. States as diverse as Nebraska, Wisconsin, and California (twice just in the last 10 years) voted to reject abolition of capital punishment or (as in Wisconsin) to reinstate capital punishment. Some issues are too important to be left to politicians. ###END Guest column: John Hummel and Oregon’s death penalty | Opinion | bendbulletin.com Portland Tribune, February 26, 2019 Just last week, Gov. Kate Brown greeted attendees of the biennial Justice Reinvestment Summit in Salem with a rousing cry: She will withhold state funding from county district attorneys who do not lower the number of convicted felons they send to prison. Let me tell you what inappropriate touching feels like. It's nothing like the prolonged hugs, the hand on the shoulder, the rubbing up against another person that is apparently rife inside the state Capitol building. Inappropriate touching is when you come home from work and find that someone has broken into your home and ransacked the place. Your late grandmother's jewelry — of no particular value other than sentimental — is gone, never to be seen again. The laptop you recently gave your daughter for her birthday — gone. The dresser drawers of her bureau have been pulled out, the contents sorted through and dumped on the floor. For the next hour, you'll think of an item and wonder if they got that, too. Yes, the camera is missing. CDs, vinyl records, hiking boots, leather jacket, your old trumpet from high school marching band. Your daughter's bicycle parked in the utility room — gone. As a former district attorney, over the years I heard victims compare burglary to what it must feel like to be raped. Yet lawmakers, obsessed with the lingering hugs and suggestive comments cited in an Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries report on sexual harassment, have no trouble dismissing the fear that comes from having the sanctity of your home invaded by strangers. One of the most vocal lawmakers — state Sen. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis — succeeded in driving one of her colleagues out of office for hugging her and touching her in a way that made her uncomfortable. Yet she joined with many of the state's Democrats in easing criminal sentencing of serious felonies — including burglary. In 2017, she and many other Democrats voted to approve HB 3078, to reduce criminal sentences for property crimes. Just last week, Gov. Kate Brown greeted attendees of the biennial Justice Reinvestment Summit in Salem with a rousing cry: She will withhold state funding from county district attorneys who do not lower the number of convicted felons they send to prison.This governor gladly signed HB 3078 into law. She will ease off thieves, but she will go after prosecutors. Brown uttered not one word about the harm property criminals do to people trying to hang on to what they have. One of the few times in my career that a jury came back smiling was in a burglary case I tried as a young prosecutor in Newport. The victim was a 25-year-old waitress who lived in a trailer with two cats. She befriended a man down on his luck and let him stay with her. He quickly became abusive. She told him to leave. She came home one day and found that he had broken in, torn the place apart, killed both of her cats and smeared their blood on the walls. The jury was happy to convict. The man got a 20-year sentence but served about two. That was in 1986. Today, he could claim either a substance abuse problem or mental illness. He could be cut loose and offered services — courtesy of justice reinvestment, a concept embraced by lawmakers who flinch at an inappropriate touch. ### |
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