Hey all. I’d like to ask a quick favor from someone who has access to LexisNexis.
What I’m looking for is an article that I ran across a couple of years ago from a NW Oregon local paper, (published in 2007. July, I think, but summer, anyway), in which a county official told the reporter, not just casually, but with some pride in their collective cleverness, that his county had been ‘encouraging’ their DA to file more felonies because felony probation brought in money from the state, whereas misdemeanors were on the county’s dime. It stopped me cold when I first read it because it totally explained a puzzling pattern that I’d been seeing and hearing about here in Lincoln County at the time. When I went back later to print it out it’d been taken down. I can’t remember which little paper it was and Google isn’t turning anything up. I know the phrase, 'file more felonies' was in it, as well as 'money from the state, and 'felony probation'. I'm pretty sure the some form of the word 'encouraged' was used because it struck me. I know that leaves a lot of territory, but the best I can do this much later.
We have an Asst DA in Lincoln County about to go on trial for prosecutorial misconduct. The misconduct that he’s charged with isn’t part of what appears to have been a policy, (trumping up felony charges and pleading them out to probation to elicit money from the state to support the county’s corrections dept), but he’s been there for many years and would have at least awareness of it going on and it would give the AG incentive and leverage to investigate the others in the DA’s office at the time who were probably more deeply involved. We have some cases spread over several years and a number of anecdotal, (and against the rules), reports from people serving on grand juries that support the implication that there was such a policy, but of itself it’s pretty thin to connect them.
Our AG is John Kroger, good guy and hopefully with aspirations for higher office. He seems to take misconduct seriously, which I find very satisfying, especially in light of how it’s not elsewhere. I want to give his office as much reason as possible to look deeper into the local situation while they have this guy on the hook, deal with whatever this mess actually is, find out the extent of what was done and how many people were involved and affected. There was a huge turnover rate in the office at the time, but the ADA’s just kept rotating through and leaving in droves, no one reported anything to the state bar as far as we know. The cases we’ve chosen are clearly some sort of misconduct, but having that article to show that it wasn’t just coincidence and being able to find out who the county official was would be really helpful, since, you know, it’s best not to ascribe to conspiracy what can be easily explained by stupidity, incompetence and pigheadedness. Especially out in the boonies.::sigh::
Much appreciated.