Getting busy
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I see that the new Multnomah County district attorney, Nathan Vasquez, is ordering the top-level deputy prosecutors back to the office full-time. He misses the "camaraderie." We'll see how that goes.
Meanwhile, Vasquez is also undoing some of the mischief that his predecessor, Mikey Schmidt, made right before Schmidt walked through the door that the voters had opened for him.
In a significant break from his predecessor, Vasquez said Wednesday his office would no longer support the leniency plea of Frank F. Swopes — who has spent 32 years in state prison stemming from a deadly Portland home invasion and sought to get out three years early.
Former District Attorney Mike Schmidt had backed Swopes’ petition through his Justice Integrity Unit. A circuit judge was all set to approve it and four others last month when Vasquez and a new law-and-order advocacy group intervened.
The group, the Oregon Criminal Justice Truth Project, succeeded in delaying the petition on procedural grounds until Vasquez took office. Without Vasquez’s support, Swopes’ petition can’t move forward....
In a statement, Vasquez said that Swopes’ spree not only left one woman dead; he also sexually assaulted another woman during a later break-in.
“(Given) the permanent scars he left in his wake, his early release back to our streets is not in the best interests of the surviving victims or the community,” Vasquez said.
You can bet that the knives are being sharpened by the Mikey people for when Vasquez runs again. But hey, that's three and a half years from now. Unless they can dig up something that they didn't find during the campaign last year, they'll have to deal with Vasquez for quite a while. Good.
Found a story that said Swopes was 30 in 1992, making him around 63 now plus or minus. An ugly character to be sure, but people who catch 35 year bits are ugly people, and that’s who tends to be looked at for sentence reductions at the far end.
ReplyDeleteI guess the question is whether we’re getting anything of commensurate value for the cost from keeping him in the can those last three years until he can get on Medicare.
I don’t know whether he’s a good candidate for any leniency or not, but the supposed effect on the victims’ families is not much of a reason to keep him jailed longer. I do know that if we don’t temper our desire to focus solely on retribution, we end up in a place where virtually all sentences will be full life plus cancer.
You forgot the violins
DeleteThe longer that a person who did what he did can be kept away from the rest of society, the better off the other 98% of law-abiding citizens will be. He got the sentence he earned. Let him serve it.
DeleteOne of the four goals of criminal law is restraint. The others are deterrence, rehabilitation, and retribution. First day of law school, 1975. Oregon is way too soft on crime.
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