In a rare public showdown inside Multnomah County’s justice system, District Attorney Nathan Vasquez has told his prosecutors not to steer serious felony cases into Judge Adrian L. Brown’s courtroom, effectively benching an elected trial judge from the county’s most high-stakes prosecutions.
The move grew out of an internal affidavit and a memo flagging a string of rulings by Brown, and it has split local lawyers and court managers over whether Vasquez is protecting the integrity of major cases or muscling in on judicial independence.
As first reported by The Oregonian/OregonLive, Vasquez’s team pulled together an internal, unfiled memorandum cataloging eight rulings they viewed as problematic, then backed it up with a single affidavit in May 2025 claiming the state could not get a fair trial in Brown’s courtroom. The packet included a May 7, 2025 affidavit by prosecutor Todd Jackson and snippets from internal team chats that, according to the DA’s office, showed a pattern they believed was undermining major prosecutions.
Why the DA Drew a Line
Vasquez’s directive landed at a time when the entire system was already creaking under pressure from an Oregon Supreme Court decision that could lead to hundreds of criminal cases being tossed if defendants did not receive lawyers quickly enough, a development that prosecutors say has forced them to be choosier about which cases move forward, according to OPB. Chronic staffing and scheduling breakdowns on the public defender side have turned some trial dates into moving targets, prosecutors argue, raising the stakes around which courtrooms they trust with their most serious charges.
The Case at the Center
A key flashpoint is the 2022 prosecution of Samuel W. Rich in Brown’s courtroom. According to court records and subsequent reporting, a jury acquitted Rich of first-degree assault but convicted him of first-degree criminal mistreatment and other offenses, and he later received a six-year sentence. That punishment has since been described by the Oregon Department of Justice as overlong and likely to be reversed, according to The Oregonian/OregonLive…