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Portland judge says she’s too busy running for reelection to oversee trials
(www.oregonlive.com)
this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2026
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Set weather Portland Homicides Courts Public Safety Portland’s DA froze an elected judge out of serious cases. Legal experts are divided on his reasoning Updated: Mar. 10, 2026, 9:44 a.m.|Published: Mar. 04, 2026, 10:00 a.m. Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Adrian Lee Brown Multnomah County Judge Adrian L. Brown, 50, presides from the bench inside her 17th-floor courtroom in February 2026.Zane Sparling/The Oregonian
By Zane Sparling | The Oregonian/OregonLive The case before Multnomah County Circuit Judge Adrian Brown was nothing to laugh about.
Samuel W. Rich, a car salesman, was in her court in 2022 on assault and criminal mistreatment charges for allegedly inflicting a catastrophic brain injury on his girlfriend’s 2-year-old son, causing the boy to suffer permanent quadriplegia.
Ensconced behind three computer monitors overlooking her 17th-floor courtroom in downtown Portland, Brown was part referee and part jury herder during the fraught three-week trial. She remained above the fray, composed and impassive, as prosecutors and defense lawyers put forward their cases.
But, tapping away on the dais, her electronic messages took on a different tone.
“Babygate!!!!!” Brown wrote to her clerk while court was in session. “That’s going to be the nickname for this case.”
It was an insensitive reference to a child-proof gate that was a key piece of evidence — and one in a string of flippant messages that Brown sent on Microsoft Teams, a workplace communication software, while overseeing the trial. Brown went on to label the lead prosecutor, Chuck Mickley, “insufferable” in a message to a fellow judge, and joked with her clerk that jurors appeared bored by Mickley’s stemwinding speeches.
Sending those messages was, to say the least, imprudent, according to legal experts.
“It’s very ill advised,” University of Arizona law professor Keith Swisher told The Oregonian/OregonLive. “The deputy prosecutor could get the impression that the judge is biased against him or his office.”
Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez thinks precisely that — based not on Brown’s off-the-cuff comments but a review of her rulings. Last year, he sidelined Brown by refusing to try serious felonies in her courtroom.
Vasquez, the county’s top prosecutor, claims Brown’s bungles on a half-dozen cases range from misdemeanors to murders, with the judge diverging from existing case law, interjecting inappropriately and developing an eyebrow-raising reputation.
His decision to bypass Brown runs counter to the will of the voters, who elected her in 2020 to preside over the full gamut of cases in state court. Now Brown whiles away her days taking plea deals in DUII and disorderly-conduct cases, and ruling on low-stakes civil matters like garnishment and self-represented disputes.
All circuit judges earn $209,000 annually.
Vasquez’s maneuver, known as judicial disqualification, is perfectly legal and easy for a prosecutor or defense attorney to do under Oregon law. Judicial disqualification requires no up-front proof. Evidence must be presented only if a judge contests the disqualification.
Most never do. Brown hasn’t.
Perhaps anticipating a legal challenge, Vasquez laid out his case against Brown in a detailed memorandum that has never been publicly filed in court, though The Oregonian/OregonLive obtained it via a public records request. In an interview, the DA said he hadn’t seen the Microsoft Teams messages in the Rich case until a reporter showed them to him.
“I certainly am disappointed by what I see in those messages,” Vasquez said. “However, my decision is based upon what we have seen in the legal rulings and the way that she has conducted trials.”
Most judicial disqualifications — colloquially known as affidaviting a judge — are one-off decisions for specific cases, based on issues such as personal discord between an attorney and a judge, or a perception that a judge’s rulings are unfair in certain types of cases. Each year, between 1,000 and 2,000 motions to disqualify or change judges are filed, according to Oregon Judicial Department data.
Vasquez has filed only a single affidavit against Brown as well, but his public pronouncements make it clear he’ll unleash plenty more if any new major felonies, known as Measure 11 crimes, land in Brown’s courtroom.
Multnomah County’s presiding judge, Judith Matarazzo, controls the court’s calendar and hasn’t assigned any cases to Brown that would violate Vasquez’s boycott since he announced it.
That means Vasquez has enacted a blanket judicial ban with a single action. Whether that show of force is justified is another matter entirely.
A pair of legal ethics experts from outside the state told The Oregonian/OregonLive that Vasquez’s memo lacks sufficient evidence that Brown is unfit to preside over important cases. Others contacted by the news organization object on principle, saying it’s improper for a district attorney to unilaterally override voters by freezing out an elected judge.
Vasquez’s supporters, meanwhile, assert that the DA is justified, saying his memo shows that Brown could be biased against the DA’s office or shaky on questions of the law.
Brown, in a 1,900-word statement, defended her record as independent and impartial, saying she had overseen hundreds of criminal cases only for Vasquez to cherry-pick a handful of cases for reasons unknown to her.
“While the decisions and rulings may not have been popular … the facts of the case and the law I applied was just,” Brown wrote in her statement to The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Brown said she had sought a meeting with Vasquez to discuss his concerns but wasn’t granted one. The judge said she spoke with several of his top lieutenants in June and received comments focused “on process over outcomes.”
“I valued the feedback as a learning opportunity,” she said.
Regardless, she remains stuck in the judiciary’s junior leagues as her first bid for reelection approaches in just a few months’ time.
Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Adrian Lee Brown Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez spoke with the media during a press conference in January 2026.Zane Sparling/The Oregonian Is disqualification of Brown overreach or spot-on? It took only a single piece of paper to begin Brown’s descent into legal limbo.
On May 7, chief deputy prosecutor Todd Jackson submitted a three-sentence affidavit on a murder case, attesting to his belief that the state could no longer get a fair trial before her.
Jackson didn’t explain why he had formed this belief. By law, he didn’t have to.
But in Vasquez’s unfiled memorandum, drafted two days earlier, the district attorney’s office laid out what it said were eight faulty decisions made by Brown over six cases between March 2022 and April 2025.
In the most serious case, a double homicide, Vasquez said Brown’s questions during a pre-trial hearing had unsettled the victims’ families, leading them to urge prosecutors to resolve the case through a plea deal. (A family member for one of the victims said Brown’s demeanor seemed “kind of off.”)
Brown’s rulings during that hearing were largely favorable to prosecutors.
“Notably, Judge Brown’s rulings of concern are not always adverse to the state,” the memo says, “but their irregularity, unpredictability and lack of connection to established legal standards gives the state great concern.”
Though Vasquez wasn’t aware of the Microsoft Teams messages at the time, he cited the Rich case in the memo. The DA noted that the judge prevented two of the state’s witnesses, both doctors, from testifying that the 2-year-old boy’s injuries weren’t consistent with an accidental fall down a flight of stairs.
Brown said she is unable to comment on the case while it is under appeal.
Another perceived error listed in the memo involved Brown’s term as an arraignment judge presiding over routine court appearances. While doing so, she unexpectedly ordered a burglary suspect to be held until a bail hearing, even though the man had no lawyer due to a shortage of public defenders. A higher-ranking judge overruled Brown and released the man hours later, court records show.
In her statement, Brown noted that the burglary suspect had frightened a small business owner, leading her to find “exceptional circumstances” to hold the man behind bars.
“Detaining someone without counsel was seen understandably as a constitutional violation,” Brown acknowledged, noting that a federal judge allowed state judges to hold people in cases with special circumstances a year later.
Several senior judges who reviewed Vasquez’s memo said it contained more than enough evidence to warrant the DA’s boycott, while others on the bench found the memo wanting or believed Vasquez had overstepped his authority. They spoke to The Oregonian/OregonLive on background to avoid jeopardizing existing professional relationships.
Norm Frink, a retired senior Multnomah County prosecutor, argues that Vasquez has shown restraint by allowing Brown to continue overseeing minor felony cases. He said that what he considers her poor judgment was evident in both the Rich case and another proceeding cited in the memo where Brown spontaneously declared a mistrial in the midst of a prosecutor’s closing argument.
(In the latter example, Brown declared the trial botched because, she said, the prosecutor had engaged in improper vouching — as attorneys are barred from personally guaranteeing the truthfulness of their witnesses. The prosecutor had told jurors the witnesses had “taken an oath” and “run the risk of committing perjury.” The defense attorney hadn’t objected to those statements before Brown jumped in.)
“Assuming those facts are true, they would be irresponsible if they didn’t affidavit her,” Frink said of the DA’s office. “It indicates not only extreme bias, but basic misunderstandings of the law.”
Yet many of the allegations contained in the memo are clearly mere pro
cedural hiccups.
In April 2025, for example, Brown authorized an ambiguously worded verdict form, which the jury fills out, for a woman accused of pointing a gun inside a church pantry. After Brown hashed out the issue with the attorneys, the jury unanimously acquitted her.
In his memo, Vasquez said that the verdict-form problem caused “needless confusion and an appearance of chaos.”
And in another example, Vasquez’s memo erroneously claims that Brown spent 20 minutes discussing whether the double homicide suspect, Bennett Miller, would be allowed to wear street clothes during a hearing. Vasquez insists that Brown, despite prosecutors’ and public defenders’ heavy caseloads, was wasting everyone’s time.
A review of the courtroom audio recording shows the discussion lasted roughly seven minutes, though the overall start time for the hearing was pushed back by 90 minutes because sheriff’s deputies were delayed in transporting Miller to the courtroom. The wait was compounded because Brown, engrossed in other work, didn’t hear the pinging Teams message from one of her clerks — notification that everyone was ready.
Vasquez, then still a senior prosecutor, was cooling his heels in the courtroom that day.
Keith Fisher, a law professor at St. Thomas University in Florida, said the memo, at best, proved that Brown had made a handful of mistakes while working in the state’s busiest courthouse over several years.
“Making an error is not an ethical violation, nor is it grounds for disqualification,” Fisher said. “If you think the judge made an error, you appeal it.”
Fisher said he thinks Brown would have a good chance of winning a blanket disqualification hearing, if she were to seek one. In such a hearing, the burden shifts to the attorney filing the motion and requires a separate judge to find the disqualification “reasonable.”
Fisher acknowledges a possible reason she has left her sidelining unchallenged:
“It’s embarrassing.”
For her part, Brown said she believed the district attorney lacked legal basis to exclude her from a broad class of cases. She said she had diligently reviewed the DA’s memo and found errors in it, but she didn’t explain why she hasn’t put the memo to the test.
“This document absolutely created a chilling effect on judicial case assignment over the last year,” she wrote.
Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Adrian Lee Brown The nameplate for Circuit Judge Adrian Lee Brown's courtroom is shown here.Zane Sparling/The Oregonian ‘Tenacious’ prosecutor becomes candidate with ‘social justice mindset’ Brown, now 50, got her seat on the Multnomah County bench the old-fashioned way: through a hard-fought election.
While all circuit judges stand for election every six years, many sidle into incumbent status after being appointed mid-term by the governor. Incumbent judges often face voters with no opponent.
Brown, in contrast, prevailed in a six-way nonpartisan primary for an open seat and secured the vote of 200,000 county residents in November 2020, compared with 145,000 supporters for the second-place finisher. (An additional 115,000 voters left the box blank).
With the state’s judicial code essentially banning candidates from making typical political statements, Brown ran on her record as a civil rights attorney for the federal government, insisting she and her opponent both shared a “social justice mindset” but only she had the real-world experience.
(In the general election, she had faced Rima Ghandour, a civil attorney whose practice focused on personal injury suits.)
When Brown, a first-time candidate, introduced herself to the voters, she said watching her own mom go to court for child support had inspired her to pursue a legal career.
An Indiana University and Lewis & Clark Law School grad, Brown enlisted in the U.S. Air Force in 2000 and served in the judge advocate general’s corps, part of the military’s tribunal system, working as both a prosecutor and defense counsel.
Seven years later, she was hired as an assistant U.S. attorney for Oregon’s federal prosecutor, and soon became the office’s civil rights coordinator.
Ron Silver, the chief of the Oregon U.S. Attorney’s office’s civil division before retiring in 2015, recalled how Brown took keen interest in enforcing violations of landmark laws like the Fair Housing and Americans with Disabilities acts, which prohibit discrimination in housing and public accommodations.
Silver described Brown as “tenacious” in confronting flinty landlords.
Brown was tapped for a high-profile job in the office shepherding the federal government’s settlement agreement with the Portland Police Bureau over officers’ use of force against people with mental illness.
Then-deputy city attorney Ellen Osoinach, now in private practice, remembers how Brown worked hard to expand the settlement to take into account the wider failures of Oregon’s mental-health-care system by adding disability and mental-health-care advocates as stakeholders.
“Judge Brown comes from a law-and-order professional background. She has married that sensibility with a deep empathy and regard for people who have disabilities,” Osoinach said.
Some in the Multnomah County Circuit Court, however, appear to believe that this empathy and regard doesn’t extend to them. One former Multnomah County judicial clerk concluded that Brown can be tone-deaf in some everyday professional situations.
In fall 2022, word trickled down the courthouse grapevine that Brown was charging clerks $1.25 for single-use coffee pods she brought in for the espresso machine installed in the communal office space on the 17th floor. On other floors, staff members brought in coffee pods to share on an informal basis, said the clerk, Kristen Holtvoigt.
Hoping to make a point about income disparity, Holtvoigt, now an attorney with her own firm in New Mexico, said she posted an anonymous sign on the 17th floor’s espresso machine highlighting judges’ six-figure salaries, compared to her own $42,000 annual wage. Two weeks later, Holtvoigt dropped off a used coffee machine on Brown’s floor with a pile of free pods.
Holtvoigt said Brown didn’t take kindly to either gesture, and with swipe-card readers and cameras tracking every movement inside the building, Holtvoigt found herself hauled into the court administrator’s office.
Holtvoigt said she quit that day in early 2023 rather than apologize.
Brown declined to comment on the matter.
Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Adrian Lee Brown Senior prosecutor Chuck Mickley delivers his closing arguments during a trial in January 2026.Zane Sparling/The Oregonian Does judge’s trash talk cross a line? Prosecutor Chuck Mickley had come to court armed to the teeth with arguments.
Facing off against Samuel Rich’s experienced criminal defense attorneys in Brown’s courtroom, Mickley aimed to prove that Rich had beaten 2-year-old Wyatt Maney and left the boy moments away from death, according to court records.
The defense offered a completely different rendition of events — arguing that Maney could have fallen down a flight of stairs in Rich’s Troutdale home while playing with the Gresham Ford salesman’s dog and the babygate had been removed.
Mickley had lined up three doctors to testify that the boy’s injuries couldn’t have been caused by an unlucky tumble.
But over the course of an hours-long evidence hearing taking place without the jury present, Brown decided that two of the doctors — including the pediatric intensive-care-unit physician who treated him — wouldn’t be allowed to testify that the stairfall injuries weren’t consistent with an accident.
Brown explained that jurors would find it “confusing” if the doctors were presented both as experts opining about the key fact in dispute and as witnesses explaining what happened to Maney inside the hospital.
Mickley couldn’t believe it. “It boggles my mind,” he protested.
“That sort of dual role is disfavored,” Brown replied. “Anyone who started practicing as a civil practitioner would understand that.”
John Coletti, a civil trial attorney who frequently litigates medical issues, says it’s “very common” for doctors to testify in both roles. But it depends on a multitude of factors, he said, including if the doctor’s expertise is relevant to the type of injury at hand.
“It happens daily in civil cases that you bring a treating physician in, not only to testify to what the injuries are, but also to testify as to what was the most medically probable cause of the injury,” he said, speaking generally.
The courthouse debate that day over the two doctors’ testimony was carried out with clipped tones at times, nothing out of the ordinary in the adversarial setting of a trial. A judge serves as the gatekeeper for all evidence presented in criminal cases, and, during the hearing, Brown emphasized that she was taking Mickley’s arguments seriously.
Days later, Brown wrote on Teams that she had grown tired of Mickley’s penchant for prolonged arguments.
“After 3 weeks of DDA Chuck Mickley I am exhausted. Good grief that guy argues about EVERYTHING!” Brown wrote, using an acronym for deputy district attorney.
“(A)nd takes his sweet time doing it,” responded Judge Amy Baggio, a former federal public defender who in 2024 became a federal District of Oregon judge.
“Right? He is insufferable,” said Brown. “And honestly, the reason I think it’s taking the jury so long on this case is because of his sloppy work. He did not do this case and the child justice.”
Baggio didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Brown noted that the Microsoft Teams chats aren’t being considered by the appellate court and were of limited relevance, adding that she never expected her private messages to be of interest.
“I agree that the use of Teams to vent or share thoughts about how counsel are performing before a jury trial is not a good practice and has distracted from the issues here,” she wrote.
Vasquez, for his part, praised Mickley, saying he
was known for his dedication to cases with child victims and has a proven track record of scoring convictions. Brown said Tuesday she respected Mickley’s work.
The jury ultimately delivered a mixed verdict in the trial, convicting Rich of first-degree criminal mistreatment and other charges, but acquitting him of first-degree assault.
Brown sentenced Rich, now 36, to six years behind bars — about a year longer than the state’s recommendation. The defense attorneys appealed, and Oregon Department of Justice attorneys have conceded that Rich’s punishment is overlong based on the conviction and should be reversed, court records show.
The state appellate court hasn’t ruled yet. Rich remains in custody.
Fisher, the law professor from Florida, said Brown’s back-and-forth with Baggio was unfortunate but hardly unusual. He said judges must hold themselves to high standards in their public comments, though it’s to be expected that they would be less filtered in private.
“I bet you dollars to donuts that the people in the DA’s office do the same thing about the judges, and maybe with good reason,” Fisher said. “It’s just human nature.”
Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Adrian Lee Brown A photograph of a baby gate was displayed in court during the child abuse trial of Samuel Rich in 2022.Court Exhibit ‘Any judge can be voted out’ Beyond Brown, Vasquez isn’t afraid to step before a microphone when he dislikes a ruling — and, like any good lawyer, he marshals the facts that best fit his case, while others get cut for time.
The DA publicly took aim at Judge Katharine von Ter Stegge last year when, in a bench trial of a scofflaw driver whose road antics had gone viral, she acquitted on some counts. Vasquez slammed the judge for sentencing Oscar Burrell to probation.
He let it go unsaid that his prosecutor also recommended a probationary punishment during the sentencing hearing.
In July, Vasquez hit out at Judge Angela Lucero when she downgraded a felony conviction to an expungeable misdemeanor for Darrell Kimberlin, a self-proclaimed anarchist guilty of vandalizing the Democratic Party of Oregon headquarters.
The six-minute-long hearing was light on dramatics, with Kimberlin’s defense attorney highlighting that her client was working as a cybersecurity programmer thanks to his employer’s second-chance policy.
In a subsequent press release, Vasquez didn’t mention that Kimberlin had paid back $49,000 in restitution. In a later interview with The Oregonian/OregonLive, Vasquez questioned if Kimberlin really put up the funds himself and said the saga of destruction during the pandemic-era unrest had inflicted incalculable harm to the city’s reputation.
Vasquez makes no apologies for this aggressive stance.
“Judges are elected officials, and the community deserves to know what their elected officials are doing,” he said. “I may be voted out in a few years if I’m not doing my job, and quite frankly, any judge can be voted out if they’re not doing their job.”
Brown has every reason to expect to keep hers.
While campaigning in 2020 in a crowded field of candidates, Brown touted her ability to make unpopular decisions, citing her work on the city’s settlement agreement as something that lost her friends around the office.
“It’s extremely important for a judge to be someone who’s willing to make unpopular decisions,” she said during that campaign.
This time, with the deadline to file for office less than one week away, Brown is running unopposed.