Oregon’s top courts begin reversing nonunanimous convictions

One is Crook County sex abuse case; no murder cases involved

SALEM, Ore. (AP) — Oregon’s top two courts on Thursday began reversing convictions by nonunanimous juries, the first of hundreds — and perhaps thousands — of cases that are being scrutinized after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in April that nonunanimous jury verdicts are unconstitutional.

The Oregon Supreme Court returned 16 cases to the trial courts. The Court of Appeals reversed convictions in three other cases and remanded them to the trial courts.

“The county prosecutor can decide to drop the charges, proceed with the charges or, perhaps, try to negotiate a settlement,” said Marc Brown, an Oregon public defender who works on appeals. “For example, there may be a case in which the defendant already served most of their sentence, so the prosecutor may offer time served in exchange for a plea.”

On May 11, a top Oregon Department of Justice official said 269 convictions should be reversed and remanded for new trials. The list will only grow, Solicitor General Benjamin Gutman said in a letter obtained by The Associated Press.

Among the convictions that the state Supreme Court reversed was the conviction, in 2017, by a nonunanimous jury in Crook County Circuit Court of Myron Newell of sex abuse in the first degree, with the victim being a girl.

“He had no criminal history at all before this one nonunanimous conviction,” said Ryan Scott, one of Newell’s attorneys. “He is 91 years old and cannot dress himself without help. He should be at home, on his farm, with his wife of more than 60 years.”

Deschutes County District Attorney John Hummel said the courts overturned one DUII conviction that his office will retry.

Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum had asked the U.S. Supreme Court not to declare nonunanimous verdicts unconstitutional, saying that doing so could invalidate as many as thousands of convictions in Oregon, the only state that allowed nonunanimous verdicts after Louisiana dropped the provision in 2018.

In many older cases, retrial will likely be impossible because over the passage of time “witnesses disappear, memories fade, and evidence is lost,” Rosenblum wrote.

No murder convictions are among the many facing potential reversals, because juries needed to be unanimous to convict on a murder charge.

One unintended consequence of the Supreme Court’s ruling is that the Oregon Department of Corrections will likely transfer many prisoners to county jails for retrials, just when those facilities are trying to reduce their populations because of the coronavirus pandemic.

“Suddenly, there will be an inflow of people from DOC to the county facilities,” Brown said.