Michael E. Bivins received at least two additional years in prison after punching a cafeteria worker at Oregon State Correctional Institution. At the sentencing hearing, Bivins also stipulated to violating probation on some counts from his earlier conviction, although he was already in custody, The Oregonian/OregonLive reported. The outlet said Bivins acknowledged repeatedly punching the worker and called Multnomah County Circuit Judge Eric Dahlin a coward.
The same report quoted prosecutor Charlie Weiss saying Bivins had committed other assaults in custody, including an assault on a transgender inmate. Dahlin described the cafeteria attack as an unprovoked punch followed by a tackle, according to OregonLive. The account describes this as a prison assault; it does not characterize it as a bias crime.
The earlier conviction and sentence
The probation violation stems from Bivins’s 2022 Portland spree, for which a Multnomah County jury convicted him of 11 charges, including arson, criminal mischief and bias crime, Willamette Week reported. In its account of the case, OregonLive reported that Bivins broke windows at two synagogues and a Black-owned restaurant and tried to set fire to the Muslim Community Center of Portland.
Reports described the original sentence differently in terms of time Bivins was expected to serve. KPTV reported a five-year prison sentence and five years of supervised probation; OregonLive said he was expected to serve about eight months in prison, while KATU reported he would serve about a year after credit for time served. Those estimates concern the earlier case, not the additional term imposed for the prison assault.
What Oregon’s bias-crime counts mean
Oregon’s reporting categories distinguish crimes from non-criminal incidents. The Oregon Department of Justice defines a hate crime as a crime motivated in part or wholly by bias against a person’s actual or perceived protected class; a bias incident is a non-criminal hostile expression motivated by bias…