By Don DuPay, edited by Theresa Griffin Kennedy, published to public media July 14, 2022.
I am writing this short essay to inform the citizens of Portland, Oregon of a serious pattern of criminal activity that is occurring in the current DA’s office.
In the 13th century, under English rule, violators of these laws were given a sentence of life in prison. But that was in England and those laws were likely modified centuries ago. Nowadays, things are done differently.
Crimes similar to Malfeasance are committed daily at 1200 SW 1st in Portland, Oregon. In this building is an office with a particular name on the door. The name on that door is MIKE SCHMIDT — as in Multnomah County District Attorney, Mike Schmidt.
The misconduct that Schmidt is committing is different than Malfeasance, which means intentionally inflicting harm on someone, while a public official and holding some sort of public office. Misfeasance in office is what I contend Schmidt is doing. Though, some say Schmidt is guilty of nonfeasance as well. I would say young Schmidt is guilty of both misfeasance and nonfeasance.
If you are found guilty of the offense of misfeasance in public office, you face some stiff penalties. The offense, explained simply, involves a public official acting in “contravention” of their position of authority, resulting in harm, injury, or financial loss or damage to a third party. Basically, it means not doing your job which leads to someone else getting hurt in some way.
Nonfeasance in office is similar and is defined thusly: “Nonfeasance is a failure to act that results in harm to another party.” These are serious offenses by a public official and that official in this case is DA Mike Schmidt.
Nonfeasance in office is the failure to act when action is required both legally and ethically. Both of these crimes, misfeasance and nonfeasance are primarily what DA Mike Schmidt has been doing since he took office 18 long months ago.
AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY THAT COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED
Case in point. On August 29, 2020, Aaron Danielson, an American supporter of the conservative group Patriot Prayer, was shot on a downtown sidewalk, and killed after participating in a pro-Trump caravan which drove through Portland. He was not a Republican or a Democrat and had political beliefs that could be described as conservative and liberal. During the otherwise nonviolent rally banners and signs supporting President Donald Trump could be seen, and cars and trucks honked their horns in support of and in protest to Trump.
But later, that night, an innocent unarmed man was shot and killed due to his political beliefs. (Harm and injury).
Unemployed Deadbeat Dad, Michael Forest Reinoehl was out looking for trouble that night. Reinoehl was one of the many beneficiaries of Portland DA Mike Schmidt’s deluded interpretation of a “restorative justice” policy that by its very definition, has little or nothing to do with actual restorative justice.
Allowing recidivist criminals to go free after assault and felony gun possession is not an example of common “restorative justice” practices. It is an example of a young, inexperienced lawyer, and former schoolteacher, who does not know what he’s doing and has no deeper understanding of criminology or the criminal justice system and how that relates to public safety.
Common restorative justice practices would be arranging “Victim Assistance” along with offenders performing “Community Service,” “Victim/Offender Mediation,” “Peacemaking Circles,” where apologies can take place, and “Family Group Conferencing.” That is restorative justice. Schmidt’s interpretation of restorative justice is not actual restorative justice, at all. It is chaos and Portland has been paying the price since Schmidt came into power.
Schmidt is not interested in true restorative justice practices. Schmidt simply releases predators after they assault and otherwise harm others. That is Schmidt’s pattern. That is his deluded understanding of what restorative justice is, (in his mind) but he is dangerously uninformed on what constitutes true restorative justice practices. He has all kinds of regard for criminals, but he does not care about the victims of criminals. Even his former staff have accused him of this.
Two fine women have provided “stinging” resignation letters, in all of a six-month period, providing important details on how “anti-woman” Schmidt really is. In only 18 months, a whopping ten women attorneys have resigned from the DA’s office due to his misogynistic behavior and treatment of the women in the office as a true-blue woman hating, man.
*There are fewer numbers of women attorneys in the Portland DA’s office in 2022 than there were some 30–40 years ago. The first letter came in January of this year, from a dedicated woman attorney, Amber Kinney, who now has her own practice in Portland. Congratulations, Amber!
The second letter came from a woman named Vanessa Palacios who told Schmidt that his office is “falling apart” and she could no longer be a part of such a toxic and hostile work environment.
The tragic 2020 murder of Aaron Danielson provides tangible reasoning as to why Schmidt is not qualified to be the DA of Portland, Oregon.
After Reinoehl had been getting into trouble with Antifa radicals, all during 2020, and acting DA Rod Underhill was preparing to retire, Mike Schmidt was set to take over the office in early 2021. But due to the violent nightly riots by militant Antifa radicals, Governor Kate Brown had Schmidt sworn in early, on August 10th of 2020.
One of the first people Schmidt released from repeated instances of crimes during this period was Reinoehl. If Schmidt was sworn in on August 10th, 2022, he would have had 19 full days and nights in which to deal with Reinoehl and his activities providing supposed “security” at violent Antifa riots where women and even transgender women were assaulted.
The first thing Schmidt began to do, as the newly appointed DA, was to allow violent offenders like Reinoehl to go freely back into Portland’s communities so they could commit more crimes in the name of Black Lives Matter. Some of these Antifa offenders even stabbed a black man in the name of BLM. Reinoehl was even arrested while in possession of an illegally obtained gun and it appears that nothing was done about that, and he was never charged, per DA Mike Schmidts instructions.
Mike Schmidt’s unusual ideas on what constitutes “restorative justice” has resulted in his outright dismissal of 666 of the 974 cases brought into the courts by Portland Police officers and detectives between May and October of 2021. That constitutes a whopping SEVENTY percent.
Does the number 666 bother you? Either way, that number is the stated number Schmidt refused to prosecute. Many of those cases involved serious physical assaults of people who were injured. They got NO “restorative justice’’, but their attackers did.
According to Schmidt the dismissed cases were either, “Not severe enough to warrant prosecution, or there was insufficient evidence to prosecute them.” I fail to find any place in the law where a District Attorney may arbitrarily decide crimes codified by the Oregon legislature were not “severe enough” to prosecute particularly if there was good police work done at the time of the arrest and witness testimony to corroborate the offense.
I fully understand the concept of “Prosecutorial discretion,” having dealt with it myself during my professional law enforcement career as a street police officer and later as a police detective for over ten years with PPB.
Officers often must decide not to arrest or cite a person as an arrest may not be the best solution for the “offender’s overall outcome.” I sometimes warned or lectured offenders instead of arresting them. I exercised my own prosecutorial discretion which I felt was fair. But never in the case of serious assault of any form.
Was it right to tow a car for a minor offense, if even legally I could? If it meant the man would lose his car, lose work time, lose money and not be able to feed his wife and children? In some cases, arresting and dragging someone into the criminal justice system makes no sense and causes a great deal of harm to the women and children at home. In many instances I chose to let things go, because an arrest would have caused serious hardship for a struggling family contending with poverty.
But I never let assaulters off the hook. They went to jail, and I aggressively pushed for prosecution, when the cases warranted it.
What Mike Schmidt is doing however, goes way beyond “prosecutorial discretion.” What Mike Schmidt is doing is arbitrarily committing the crime of misfeasance in office, and nonfeasance in office. Every day he goes to work and does nothing but suck his salary from the public trough, taking taxpayers dollars, and refuses to prosecute dangerous predators, then Mike Schmidt shows us what his true values are–the plight of dangerous criminals, victims be damned, and that includes women and children.
Respected attorneys and advocates, Amber Kinney and Vanessa Palacios have both made that claim, and wouldn’t they know better than anyone? That Schmidt does not care about victims but feels more for violent offenders, who tend to be male?
OUTLANDISH SALARIES FOR ELITIST POLITICIANS- NOTHING NEW!
The District Attorney is paid in two ways. Multnomah County contributes $93,687 annually. The state of Oregon contributes $149,832 annually. The total is an outlandish $242,519. This is what Schmidt is paid. With our taxes! To do nothing and contribute to the breakdown of Portland’s public safety.
Is this what you want for Portland?
These figures break down thusly: $20,293 monthly salary. $676,441 per day and for an 8-hour day, $84,00 an hour. DA Mike Schmidt makes $84,00 an hour to not prosecute cases. To sit on his rump and ignore the reality of crime victims and the lost human capital that results when victims of violent crimes, particularly sexually based crimes are ignored in favor of violent male offenders. While Schmidt enjoys a security detail and to live in the safety of his Ivory Tower, regular Portlanders, who PAY his salary are put at risk every time they walk out their front door.
This includes the late, Donald A. Pierce, an 82-year-old man who was recently beaten to death by one of Schmidts troubled male offenders, who he seems to like so much. A typical violent thug who had a chip on his shoulder and decided to take it out on a frail old man simply walking down a downtown Portland Street.
*Donald A. Pierce was a professor Emeritus at Oregon State University and graduated from Oklahoma State in 1965.
SOLUTIONS?
The next question is how do the citizens remove someone as defiant and clueless as Schmidt from office? Back in the day cops like Jim Purcell jr. (who later became the chief of PPB) and Lt. Carl Crisp (both as corrupt as they could be) would have picked up the DA to go and have a talk. He would perhaps be invited to a duck hunting trip on Sauvie island. Whether he survived or not depended on a major change of heart. That’s how it was done back then. But the gangster days are long gone, now.
Who then could possibly prosecute Mike Schmidt for his crimes of misfeasance and nonfeasance in office? Perhaps the Oregon Attorney General? Well, that is problematic.
The Oregon Attorney General is none other than Ms. Ellen Rosenblum. Ellen is the Queen of measure 110, (the law that makes it okay to use all kinds of dangerous drugs on the street and in public) so that makes her a co-conspirator with Schmidt. And even as I write this, both Schmidt and Rosenblum are seeing the error of their ways in ever thinking the disasterous Measure 110 could be successful. We all are. It has been an abysmal failure and has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of troubled Portlanders, including two young high school students, not even 18.
What has been done is the Genocide of a whole group of young people, by letting them think it's okay to use hard narcotics, and thereby turning them into virtually hopeless addicts. That has been Rosenblum’s contribution, with Schmidt’s blessing.
“The passage of Ballot Measure 110 sends a clear message of strong public support that drug use should be treated as a public health matter rather than a criminal justice matter…” said Schmidt.
The trouble with his statement is that any possession of a dangerous controlled substance should be a criminal justice matter. The “war on drugs” must be a continuing effort for law enforcement and law makers. It will never go away, and the sooner law makers understand that the better for everyone.
I see no possibility of prosecution from the Oregon Attorney General Rosenblum. She is too corrupt as a politician and too weak, also. Weak and cowardly. Together, Rosenblum and Schmidt, shamelessly using the mantle of restorative justice, have jumped headlong into the cesspool of extreme and dangerous liberalism, where nothing is wrong, and no rules apply. The rampant drug use and criminal activity after the passing of Measure 110 is what we are seeing right now, on our streets.
When there are no rules, or any fear of repercussions for breaking the rules, young people will repeatedly test their limits, for kicks, and invariably, they will die as a result. That is just human nature and the way of the world.
Perhaps the United States Attorney for Oregon, Scott Erick Asphaug could prosecute Mike Schmidt. While it may be hypothetically possible, realistically it will never happen. He also would be too much of a coward to do something that would put him out on a limb, professionally.
Another way to unseat Mike Schmidt is by recalling him. The problem is that recalls are time consuming and expensive. It also takes a “groundswell,” of public emotion to pull off a recall and frankly, I don’t see any groundswell at this time. Although public disgust of Schmidt is becoming more vocal, 90 percent of Portlanders just don’t care enough to commit to getting involved. They want someone else to fight for them. THEY don’t want to have to get their hands dirty by getting involved. Again, human nature and the path of least resistance.
Black activist and former state legislator Avel Gordly attempted a recall against then Mayor Sam Adams for his indiscretions several years ago. There was at that time a groundswell of public sentiment for ousting Sam Adams, but even then, that recall didn’t work, and Sam chose not to budge, remaining in office and completing his term. I don’t see a recall effort against Mike Schmidt in the future that would ever be successful.
Could the Oregon State Bar Association be the agency to remove Mike Schmidt from office?
The Oregon State Bar (OSB) was established in 1935 by the Oregon Legislative Assembly to license and discipline lawyers who don’t do their job or break the rules, regulate the practice of law and provide a variety of services to bar members and the public. The bar is a public corporation and an instrument of the Oregon Judicial Department, funded by membership and program fees.
Recent punitive action against 332 attorneys included suspending their licenses to practice law. This action was taken by the Oregon State Bar because the lawyers failed to meet a critical deadline in the accounting of client trust accounts. In other words, they failed to meet an important deadline that would have protected client money.
Oregon State Bar, between March and December 2021 sent out mass emails on eight occasions reminding these lawyers of the impending deadline and the penalty for missing it. The attorneys, comically, claimed they never got the email and that it went into their Spam Folder.
This was a wholesale action against the lawyers on a small but important detail, the accounting of client’s money.
I conclude the Oregon State Bar does take attorney actions seriously, even out of control DA’s like young Schmidt. The bar association ultimately wields the power of the purse over miscreant attorneys just like Schmidt and it is up to them to answer to you, the taxpayer.
I am bringing this essay to the public to inform every one of the ongoing criminal actions of DA Mike Schmidt and how YOU can contact the Oregon State Bar with your views on the matter. Whether you believe Schmidt should be disbarred, or at the very least disciplined and supervised in his professional duties in the DA’s office, is up to you, but you should make the effort to let the OSB know who and why you feel how you do.
If you feel so inclined, and truly care about Portland, then you can write, snail mail, a letter with your thoughts and suggestions, send it to the Oregon State Bar at the address below, or you can call and speak to someone on the phone or send an email.
Oregon State Bar Association
5335 Meadows Ste 300. Lake Oswego, Oregon. 97035
Telephone: (503) 620–0222. Email: info@osbar.ore
By Don DuPay