The Oregon Supreme Court handed criminal justice reform advocates a victory Thursday—and potentially saved the state from having to build a new prison.
In 2017, the Oregon State Legislature passed a law that eased sentencing rules around property theft. By shortening the length of sentences for those convicted of theft, the bill aimed to help solve Oregon’s prison crowding problem. That would also help the state avoid the need to build a second women’s prison, which would have cost an estimated $17.5 million.
Later that year, Clackamas County District Attorney John Foote sued the state, saying that the bill—titled the Safety and Savings Act—was unconstitutional. The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the new law’s constitutionality in a Thursday ruling.
“The Safety and Savings Act was a significant effort by the Legislature to bring commonsense reform to the state’s criminal justice system,” said Kimberly McCullough, policy director at the ACLU of Oregon, in a statement sent to the Mercury Thursday. “We are relieved the law was upheld.”
Foote’s argument hinged on two different ballot measures passed by Oregon voters, each now over a decade old. Measure 57, passed in 2008, set mandatory minimum sentences for property theft crimes, meaning those convicted had to be sentenced to a minimum amount of time.
The Safety and Savings Act reduced those mandatory minimums set by Measure 57—for example, the minimum sentence for first-degree theft dropped from 18 months to 13 months.
The problem, Foote argued, was that legislators were bypassing rules put in place by 1994’s Measure 10. That measure required all sentencing law changes to pass through the legislature with a supermajority (a two-thirds vote). The Safety and Savings Act didn’t pass with two thirds of the vote.
Measure 10 passed in conjunction with Measure 11, which imposed strict mandatory minimums for violent crimes—and which many criminal justice reform advocates see as harsh and outdated.
“It is incredibly difficult to get a two-thirds supermajority of the Legislature to agree on any substantive issues,” said David Rogers, the executive director of the ACLU of Oregon, in the ACLU’s statement. “So while we now know that mandatory minimum sentences have been proven to be ineffective and incredibly expensive, lawmakers’ hands have been tied.”
The Supreme Court heard Foote’s argument in a joint hearing with Santiago Vallin, a Lincoln County man who said the 2017 sentence he received for petty theft went against new sentencing rules put forth by the Safety and Savings Act. While the Supreme Court declined to rule in Foote’s case, its Thursday ruling in Vallin’s favor effectively upheld the new minimum sentencing rules.
The court’s ruling was based on the reasoning that the Measure 57 minimum sentences had already been changed by a legislative supermajority in 2009. Legislators voted to phase in the new theft sentencing rules after realizing that if they all went into effect right away, the state’s prison population would skyrocket. Because those laws had already been changed with a supermajority vote once, the court ruled, the legislature should be able to make additional changes with a simple majority.
The ACLU of Oregon sees Thursday’s decision as a major victory in the fight against mandatory minimum sentences.
“The court today affirmed that the Legislature has the power to do their job and update criminal justice and public safety policies based on new information, research, best practices, and budget constraints,” said Rogers said in the ACLU’s statement. “When criminal justice policies are proven to be ineffective or too costly, we shouldn’t make it harder for our legislators to pass important reforms.”
When asked by the Mercury whether the court’s ruling could have any impact on repealing the mandatory minimums set by Measure 11, Rogers said that he didn’t want to jump too far ahead of himself—but that “it might actually provide a little bit of daylight” on other sentencing laws.
