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