Held to answer

Michael Scott Simons confessed to sexually abusing three women with Alzheimer’s disease. Ellen Rosenblum, candidate for Oregon’s Attorney General, let him out of prison.

As a judge on the Oregon Court of Appeals, Rosenblum wrote the opinion in 2007 freeing Simons four years after a 98-year prison sentence.

Joshua Norman Kelley’s confessions about molesting two children were not enough to keep him in prison, either. Kelley, too, was freed from prison courtesy of an opinion written by Rosenblum.

Follow the links and read the opinions yourself. Maybe you will agree, as Rosenblum wrote, that corroborating evidence was needed that a crime had been committed – even though the victims were too infirm or too young to corroborate. Or, perhaps you’ll agree with the original trial judges, who found there was enough evidence to convict both men.

Now that Rosenblum is retired from the Court of Appeals and is running for Oregon Attorney General, she has not offered a vigorous defense of her two prior opinions. In fact, she acts like she had nothing to do with them.

During an Attorney General candidates’ forum at Portland State University, Rosenblum and her opponent, Dwight Holton, were asked about the Simons’ case. The question, submitted by someone in the audience, simply asked the candidates to comment on a case in which the Court of Appeals overturned rape convictions against a nursing assistant who confessed to assaulting three elderly patients in his care.

When Rosenblum answered, she gave no indication that she had voted with the majority or had written the opinion.

She did say that “fortunately … that defendant is still in custody. He had many other convictions.”

That is not true.

“Michael Simons ran like a free man after being released out the back door of the Benton County jail on Friday morning,” reported the Corvallis Gazette-Times.

The story went on to say that Simons, 27, confessed to the rape, sodomy and sexual abuse of one Alzheimer’s patient and the sexual abuse of two others between Dec. 1, 2003, and Jan. 31, 2004.

“All three patients were in his care at the Samaritan Heart of the Valley nursing home at the time. He was convicted of the crimes, in addition to misdemeanor sexual assault of two female coworkers, in June 2004 and was sentenced to 98 years in prison.”

Then there was the Kelley case, for which Rosenblum also wrote the opinion. In that Washington County case, Kelley confessed on three separate occasions in 2006 to sexually abusing his young daughter and his ex-girlfriend’s son.
On the first occasion he disclosed what he had done to a coworker.

On the second occasion he arrived at his men’s group meeting and told them he wanted to apologize for lying.

“I am really, really sorry because I lied to you and I need to tell the truth now,” he said specifically to a man in the group who had helped him.  He then told the group in some detail that he molested his two children.

On the third occasion Kelley made detailed statements about sexual acts with the two children at a parole meeting. He was arrested and subsequently convicted of eight counts of first-degree sexual abuse and eight counts of first-degree sodomy.

“Because defendant’s confessions were not corroborated, they were not sufficient to warrant conviction,” Rosenblum wrote in her ruling in 2010.

In her world, even when a defendant begs to tell the truth – in front of multiple witnesses – it is not enough.

In her written opinions, Rosenblum drew a distinction between admission and confession. Admitting guilt is not the same thing as admitting to facts. While that’s the sort of parsing that attorneys engage in, Rosenblum did not offer a teaching moment at the PSU forum, and it would have been the perfect place to do so.

The forum was sponsored by the National Crime Victim Law Institute at Lewis & Clark Law School.

Rosenblum did not use this opportunity to show young attorneys how justice comes and goes in a court of law. But she did tell them more than once that she would be an advocate for “the vulnerable.”

In her campaign literature she has insisted she will “protect our children by locking up sexual predators…,” and that she will “stand up for seniors against ruthless telemarketers and sweepstakes scams… .”  (Apparently telemarketers are more dangerous than sexually deviant nursing assistants.)

And as she has done in other candidate forums, she took swipes at her opponent, Holton, for not having lived in Oregon long enough.

Given his behavior at the Portland State forum, I’d say he’s acting like an Oregon native with his laid-back campaign. Instead of holding Rosenblum accountable on these two appellate court decisions, he didn’t even point a finger at her.

That’s too bad because the winner of this Democratic primary race will likely be the next state Attorney General, since no Republicans are running.

Go back and look at the links to those two court cases that were overturned by Rosenblum when she was on the Court of Appeals. The lawyers who argued the case on behalf of the state of Oregon were from the Attorney General’s Office.

Had Rosenblum been occupying that office, would she have even bothered to fight those appeals?

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

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