Multnomah DA will boycott Portland judge, blocking her from trying serious criminal cases
In the lawyerly equivalent to a slap in the face, Multnomah County prosecutors will no longer argue serious criminal cases in the courtroom of
Circuit Judge Adrian Brown.
District Attorney Nathan Vasquez announced the disqualification in response to inquiries from The Oregonian/OregonLive on Wednesday afternoon.
“We do not take the decision to remove a particular type of charge from a judicial officer’s courtroom lightly,” Vasquez said. “Our office’s experience with Judge Brown’s rulings has led us to make the decision.”
In particular, the top prosecutor said Brown will no longer preside over series felonies — known as Balliot Measure 11 crimes — including murder, first-degree rape, robbery and assault.
The DA didn’t specify which of Brown’s past rulings had drawn his ire, though he said defense attorneys have also sought to switch judges when assigned to Brown’s seventeenth-floor courtroom.
Vasquez made the decision last week when Brown was assigned the case of Rodney Arreguin, a 42-year-old man facing a second-degree murder charge in a
downtown shooting last month.
Shortly after Arreguin’s May 5
arraignment, Chief Deputy District Attorney Todd Jackson filed a motion for change of judge, citing in an affidavit “my belief that the state cannot receive a fair and impartial hearing.”
Any prosecutor or defense attorney can request a change of judge; taken one at a time, they can be an indication of a personality clash or bad blood.
This
directive is far more sweeping, though Vasquez has left the door open to reconciliation and could stop disqualifying Brown from cases at any time.
Learning of the judicial ban from a reporter, Multnomah County Presiding Judge Judith Matarazzo said she had approved Jackson’s affidavit as a matter of course.
“I just sign the affidavits. I don’t really ask any questions about them, and typically I get about one a day,” Matarazzo said Wednesday.
While judges are independently elected, the overall caseload is managed by Matarazzo. Murder cases are assigned by rotation among the county’s 38 elected judges.
Matarazzo was
herself a target for a previous DA boycott in 2017, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported at the time.
Oregon law forbids any judge from hearing a case once one legal team declares they believe the proceeding won’t be impartial — leaving Matarazzo’s hands tied.
Brown, 49, won election to the Multnomah County bench
in a hotly contested campaign in 2020, running on her 13 years of experience as a federal prosecutor in Oregon focusing on civil rights enforcement.
She was a
key player in the 2012 settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the Portland Police Bureau’s use of force against those with mental illness.
Judges are
elected for six-year terms. Their current salary is $185,500 a year.
Brown had only one item on the docket Wednesday, an 8:30 a.m. sentencing for a man convicted of misdemeanor commercial sexual solicitation.
She didn’t immediately respond to a phone call or text message requesting comment.