A4 BAKER CITY HERALD • TUESDAY, JULY 19, 2022
BAKER CITY
Opinion
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Baker City, Oregon
EDITORIAL
Proper
punishment
for teenage
criminals
P
olice and the Baker County District Attorney’s
office have released scant information about
the fatal shooting of a male juvenile on July 13
in Baker City.
Part of the reason is simple — the accused killer is
also a juvenile, a 17-year-old male.
Authorities generally don’t release the names of ju-
venile suspects — even when the charges, as in this
case, include second-degree murder — at least not
initially.
It’s not so clear, though, why officials haven’t an-
swered a few basic questions that ought not jeopardize
anyone’s privacy. This includes the circumstances of
the suspect’s arrest. He fled the scene of the shoot-
ing, in the parking lot at the Baker Technical Institute,
according to a press release from the Baker County
Sheriff’s Office. Ashley McClay, public information
officer for the Sheriff’s Office, later told the Herald
that the suspect was arrested in “the early morning
hours” of July 13.
Nor have authorities said whether the female juve-
nile, who was also at the BTI parking lot but was not
hurt, called police to report the shooting, or whether
there were other witnesses, one of whom made the
initial call.
What we do know is, of course, terrible.
A boy is dead.
And although it’s premature, given the paucity of
information, to make absolute pronouncements, pre-
sumably the district attorney, Greg Baxter, has a legiti-
mate reason to have filed a motion seeking to have the
suspect prosecuted as an adult, a decision a judge will
make.
This wouldn’t even be an issue if the suspect were 18
rather than 17.
That age different is not significant, though, in a sit-
uation when somebody ends up dead.
Absent compelling extenuating circumstances —
which might exist, to be sure — it would be proper for
the defendant in this case to be charged, and if con-
victed, to be punished, as an adult.
That could mean the difference between the shooter
spending the rest of his life in prison, or being released
within 15 years.
Sadly, this wouldn’t have been an issue a few years
ago.
When Oregon voters approved Measure 11 in 1994,
they endorsed a mandatory minimum sentencing sys-
tem that required juvenile defendants ages 15-17 to
be prosecuted as adults for murder and other serious
crimes such as rape and assault.
But the Oregon Legislature weakened Measure 11
when it passed Senate Bill 1008 in 2019. Most notably,
the law removed the requirement that juveniles 15-17
charged with the most serious crimes, including mur-
der, be prosecuted as adults. Instead, prosecutors, as
Baxter has done, must seek a hearing before a judge.
That’s unfortunate.
And unnecessary.
But at least there’s still a process by which a murder
suspect can be potentially held to account for a hei-
nous act rather than being coddled, comparatively
speaking, due solely to what might be a few months
difference in age.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
CONTACT YOUR PUBLIC OFFICIALS
Oregon Gov. Kate Brown: 254 State
Capitol, Salem, OR 97310; 503-378-3111;
www.governor.oregon.gov.
Oregon State Treasurer Tobias Read:
oregon.treasurer@ost.state.or.us; 350
Winter St. NE, Suite 100, Salem OR
97301-3896; 503-378-4000.
Oregon Attorney General Ellen F.
Rosenblum: Justice Building, Salem, OR
97301-4096; 503-378-4400.
Oregon Legislature: Legislative
documents and information are
available online at www.leg.state.or.us.
State Sen. Lynn Findley (R-Ontario):
Salem office: 900 Court St. N.E., S-403,
Salem, OR 97301; 503-986-1730. Email:
Sen.LynnFindley@oregonlegislature.gov
State Rep. Mark Owens (R-Crane):
Salem office: 900 Court St. N.E., H-475,
Salem, OR 97301; 503-986-1460. Email:
Rep.MarkOwens@oregonlegislature.gov
Baker City Hall: 1655 First Street, P.O.
Box 650, Baker City, OR 97814; 541-523-
6541; fax 541-524-2049. City Council
meets the second and fourth Tuesdays at
7 p.m. in Council Chambers. Councilors
Jason Spriet, Kerry McQuisten, Shane
Alderson, Joanna Dixon, Kenyon
Damschen, Johnny Waggoner Sr. and
Dean Guyer.
Baker City administration: 541-523-
6541. Jonathan Cannon, city manager;
Ty Duby, police chief; Sean Lee, fire chief;
Michelle Owen, public works director.
Baker County Commission: Baker
County Courthouse 1995 3rd St., Baker
City, OR 97814; 541-523-8200. Meets
the first and third Wednesdays at 9 a.m.;
Bill Harvey (chair), Mark Bennett, Bruce
Nichols.
Baker County departments: 541-
523-8200. Travis Ash, sheriff; Noodle
Perkins, roadmaster; Greg Baxter, district
attorney; Alice Durflinger, county
treasurer; Stefanie Kirby, county clerk;
Kerry Savage, county assessor.
COLUMN
Which Betsy Johnson would govern?
B
etsy Johnson entered my office at
The Astorian in 2000 as a candidate
for the state House of Representa-
tives. Decades prior, our family histories
intersected when my father and Johnson’s
mother were colleagues on the Oregon
State Board of Higher Education. They
had a simpatico relationship. So I was in-
clined to like this legislative candidate.
And I did.
Not being a pollster, I will leave it to
others to speculate on the viability of
Johnson’s strategy for winning the three-
way race she has with Democrat Tina
Kotek and Republican Christine Dra-
zan. What interests me much more is
what kind of governor she would be.
Oregon has not had a governor with
business ownership in their background
since Victor Atiyeh, our last Republican
governor, who led the state from 1979 to
1987. Atiyeh grasped the concept of be-
ing the state’s CEO.
Our state government has grown con-
siderably since the 1980s, but some of
the same challenges beg for oversight.
With government’s growth, the state’s
dependence on computer systems and
software platforms has grown markedly.
And Oregon has lacked a governor who
grasped that particular challenge and
dealt with it.
Oregon’s state government’s computer
system disasters are no secret. Refresh-
ing my memory about those malfunc-
tions, I consulted a man with some 30
years of watching the statehouse — Dick
Hughes, our newspaper’s Salem colum-
nist. “They’re awful,” Hughes said.
On the one hand, computer systems
have become the nervous systems of
Steve
Forrester
Writer’s Notebook
most businesses and governments. On
the other hand, no candidate for state
office will run on a platform of improv-
ing them. This is not sexy stuff.
Based on what Hughes tells me and
what I know of Johnson, she would have
the moxie to ask the tough questions of
systems and software providers who are
contracted to serve the divisions of state
government — which are equivalent
to large companies — in terms of their
payroll, budget and the size of the cus-
tomer base they serve.
Guns, however, are a sexy issue — a
highly visible flashpoint. When Johnson
told me, more than a decade ago, about
the machine gun that she purchased at
an auction, I was startled. In U.S. Ma-
rine Corps infantry training, I had fired
the M60 machine gun. Why, I won-
dered, would anyone not in uniform
want that killing machine?
When Johnson and I had this conver-
sation, a national community of public
health physicians was gathering num-
bers on the scale of gun woundings,
deaths and suicides. They argued Amer-
ica should recognize this as a public
health issue. A calamity. An epidemic.
An example of this public health per-
spective was “The Medical Costs of
Gunshot Injuries in the United States,”
published in the Journal of the Ameri-
can Medical Association. Its conclusions
were: “Gunshot injury costs represent a
substantial burden to the medical care
system. Nearly half this cost is borne by
the US taxpayers,” (Aug. 4, 1999).
David Hemenway, of the Harvard
School of Public Health, was a lead-
ing explorer of the intersection of fire-
arm woundings and deaths and public
health. “Private Guns, Public Health”
was his 2004 book. The virtue of He-
menway’s work and other public health
physicians is that it moved the gun issue
away from politics and emotion into the
world of medicine, healing and preven-
tion. In an attempt to have a fruitful di-
alogue with Johnson, I gave her one of
Hemenway’s papers. At that point, this
very articulate woman said nothing in
response.
I was sorry to hear Johnson’s response
to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas,
but it was the Betsy I listened to some 20
years ago.
I know that her independent cam-
paign for governor demands she culti-
vate a hard-line stance for the single-is-
sue voter — to cut into the Republican
electorate. That’s fine for short-term
thinking. But it is not leadership for
what has become a mortal concern.
Put simply, Johnson is on the wrong
side of history. And if Oregon has an-
other Umpqua Community College
shooting (2015), Clackamas Town Cen-
ter incident (2012) or Thurston High
School shooting (Kip Kinkel, 1998),
most Oregonians will want much more
than a cliched response from their gov-
ernor.
Steve Forrester, the former editor and publisher
of The Astorian, is the president and CEO of EO
Media Group.
OTHER VIEWS
Packing Supreme Court would be ruinous
BY ADAM CARRINGTON
“M
an learns from history that
man doesn’t learn from his-
tory.” My father used to re-
peat this line to me, a saying he heard
from one of his teachers.
We see the quote’s wisdom in cur-
rent calls to add justices to the Supreme
Court. Those calls came loudly from
the political left in reaction to President
Donald Trump’s appointments of Neil
Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy
Coney Barrett. They have returned in
the wake of the court’s just-completed
term. Those justices proved crucial
votes in decisions to expand religious
liberty, protect gun owners and overturn
Roe v. Wade.
We have been here before. In 1937,
Congress voted on President Frank-
lin D. Roosevelt’s “court-packing” plan.
That plan sought to add up to six jus-
tices to the nine already serving.
FDR’s endeavor failed, and deserv-
edly so.
The problem with court packing lies
not in its strict legality. Congress sets
the number of Supreme Court justices.
Thus, it has the legal power to change
that number. Moreover, the legislative
branch has exercised this power in the
past.
The problem with court packing goes
deeper. To pinpoint its shortcomings,
we must understand the role the courts
play in our system of government. The
judiciary holds a relationship to the law,
unlike any other branch. It must take
the law as the law exists and interpret
and apply it to decide legal disputes. The
judiciary thus depends on the law as the
basis for all its reasoning and all its ac-
tions.
Not so with Congress and the pres-
ident. Those two institutions do rely
partly on the law, especially the highest
law of the Constitution. They obtain the
As in 1937, this new court-packing
scheme is, in all likelihood,
doomed to failure.
power to act, legislate and enforce laws
from that document. But they also de-
pend on voters, needing their support
to retain office. This is their greater de-
pendence, at least regarding the pressure
to act. While working through constitu-
tional mechanisms, the people exert sig-
nificant control over the actions taken
by these two branches.
The Constitution’s framers linked the
judiciary to the law to better achieve
justice. The law seeks to treat all people
equally and to give them a fair chance
to establish innocence. The people sup-
port such laws in the abstract, voting
for them through their elected repre-
sentatives. But the framers knew the
people’s immediate response to events
and individuals to which the law ap-
plied might involve prejudice and pas-
sion. Popular will might wish to skirt
the protections of the law, punish a per-
son because he belonged to an unpop-
ular group or convict without process
a person accused of a heinous crime.
Supreme Court justices are insulated
from these pressures by not facing an
election and serving for good behavior,
meaning essentially for life. Their focus
on the law, statutory and constitutional,
means they uphold the better version
of the people’s will as written down in
just and equal laws, not as manifested
in immediate reactions. The justices
thus can stem the tide of prejudice and
passion in service of the better angels
of our nature. Due to this needed role,
Congress has not changed the court’s
composition since 1869.
This task for the justices illumi-
nates the problem with court-packing
schemes, old and new. Then, as now,
the plan to pack the court came from
intense opposition to court decisions.
This opposition came from a passionate
and prejudiced reaction that wished the
court to follow the policy preferences of
the other branches, not the law as found
in the Constitution.
In the 1930s, at least five justices op-
posed important elements of the New
Deal and seemed poised to undermine
it further. They had good grounds for
suspecting that FDR and Congress had
greatly overstepped their constitutional
bounds. They rightly, for a time, op-
posed pressures to act in conformity
with those institutions’ policy prefer-
ences, though the “switch in time that
saved nine” resulted in the court acqui-
escing to much of the New Deal even-
tually.
Today, the political left wants more
justices to overturn the court’s recent
decisions on religious liberty, the Sec-
ond Amendment and abortion. These
plans come from policy preferences
wrapped in weak constitutional argu-
ments. The court this past term has
done much to remove judicial policy-
making from its efforts and instead ap-
ply the law as written. The opposition
to this beneficial direction would seek
to make the court into more of a second
legislative branch.
As in 1937, this new court-packing
scheme is, in all likelihood, doomed to
failure. It should go nowhere, another
likely unheeded warning to future gen-
erations.
Let us recall FDR’s failure to remem-
ber the real role of our Supreme Court.
And let us seek to encourage and pre-
serve that role for the sake of justice and
the rule of law.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of
politics at Hillsdale College in Michigan.