So, Now I'm O.J. Simpson

Letter to The Oregonian
by: Gregory W. Byrne, Esq.

Opinion: AFT v. Oregon Taxpayers United

When A Trial By Jury Is A Farce

So, Now I'm O.J. Simpson

By Bill Sizemore, NewsWithViews.com

Several friends have told me over the past few years, “Bill, someday your ridiculous case will be overturned by the courts and you will be vindicated.” To each of those friends I have responded, “When that happens, you can rest assured that The Oregonian will not run a headline saying: Sizemore Vindicated. Their headline will say: Like O.J. Simpson, Sizemore Gets Off.

Thanks to The Oregonian for being so predictable. After the news broke this week that the Court of Appeals had overturned the personal judgment against me, The Oregonian opened their editorial with a comparison to me and OJ. Simpson, ignoring the distinction that O.J. was found by a jury to owe millions for murdering two innocent people, and simply didn’t pay, while in my case the court said I don’t owe the teachers union any money.

Truth is, last week’s decision in my favor by the Oregon Court of Appeals did not vindicate me. The court simply concluded that there was no legal basis for holding me personally liable for the judgment against Oregon Taxpayers United. That’s the news, folks, but as Paul Harvey says, “Here’s the rest of the story.”

The Oregonian’s editorial stated, “…a jury found that Sizemore and his crew engaged in a ‘calculated course of criminal conduct’ and ‘cynical, criminal manipulation of the democratic process’.” That statement is patently false. The jury did not find that or make any such statement. Multnomah County Circuit Court Judge Jerome LaBarre made that statement after the trial was over. Remember, however, that the jury, not Judge LaBarre, was the fact finder in our case. Moreover, of all people involved in our case, Judge Jerome LaBarre has no right to claim any moral high ground.

Judge Jerome LaBarre presided over the OEA v. Oregon Taxpayers United case for three long years. The entire time, the judge concealed from everyone the fact that his own son was a member and activist in the same union that was suing us in his courtroom. Only when his son was elected president of his local and the secret could no longer be kept, did Judge LaBarre confess his three-year conflict of interest and resign from the case. That was after three years of manipulating our case so that his son’s union won at every turn.

Where was The Oregonian’s editorial criticizing Judge LaBarre’s reprehensible conduct? They knew about his conflict of interest, but instead of reporting it, told me the fact didn’t seem newsworthy to them.

During the trial, Judge LaBarre suppressed evidence that would have made it impossible for our jury of fourteen Democrats and one Green Party member to have found against us. Then, at the end of the trial, he and the unions formulated jury instructions that made it all but impossible for the jury not to find against us. The entire trial was orchestrated to reach a predetermined conclusion and the Portland media gave them all the cover they needed to pull it off.

For example, the public has been led by news coverage of the trial to believe that I engaged in a pattern of forgeries to get measures on the ballot. Here’s the fact: We submitted approximately 266,000 signatures on the two measures over which the unions sued us. The total number of forgeries that were presented to the jury was less than 30, less than one-thousandth of one percent of the whole. Two employees, Becky Miller and Kelli Highley, admitted that indeed they had forged a handful of signatures (12 to 14 each) on the two petitions, and both stated under oath that I neither knew of nor authorized their actions.

I have never forged signatures, told anyone else to, or knowingly looked the other way while someone else did. In fact, I have turned in for prosecution dozens of circulators, who we caught forging signatures. As for the other charges against OTU, never in this country have such legally absurd claims ever even gone to trial. Who ever heard of a political entity suing a political opponent for all of their campaign money back tripled, because the other side’s tax returns were allegedly inaccurate?

Anyone with any knowledge of Oregon politics knows exactly what is going on in this case. The teachers union got tired of spending millions of dollars every election fighting my pro-taxpayer measures, which have saved Oregon taxpayers billions of dollars, and decided to sue me out of politics. They sued me in liberal Multnomah County, tossed all of the Republicans out of the jury pool, and got a judge whose son was an activist in their own union. Low and behold, with that stacked deck they won a multi-million judgment for which I personally was held liable, even though I was not a party to the case and never had a trial. Talk about a miscarriage of justice.

Some months ago, the unions showed their hand when they offered to not pursue me for the $4.5 million I owed them, if I would simply agree to drop my appeal and stay out of politics for 15 years. I rejected their offer, which was nothing short of legal blackmail, and last week saw the judgment tossed by the court of appeals.

In the final analysis, here’s my sin: I have placed measures on the ballot that have given Oregonians the opportunity to decide for themselves what kind of government they want and how much taxes they want to pay? That’s it. So, why is it so important to so many on the left side of Oregon’s political spectrum that voters not be given those choices? What’s wrong with letting the people vote?

Apparently, it’s a big enough deal to throw out the legal rulebook and journalistic ethics in an all-out effort to bury the guy who puts the measures on the ballot that gives the voters all of those choices. Well, so far their plan hasn’t worked. At any rate, thanks to the Oregon Court of Appeals for getting this one right.

© 2006 Bill Sizemore - All Rights Reserved

Bill Sizemore is a registered Independent who works as executive director of the Oregon Taxpayers Union, a statewide taxpayer organization. Bill was the Republican candidate for governor in 1998. He and his wife Cindy have four children, ages eight to thirteen, and live on 36 acres in Beavercreek, just southeast of Oregon City, Oregon.
Bill Sizemore is considered one of the foremost experts on the initiative process in the nation, having placed dozens of measures on the statewide ballot. Bill was raised in the logging communities of the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state, and moved to Portland in 1972. He is a graduate of Portland Bible College, where he taught for two years. A regular contributing writer to www.NewsWithViews.com. 

E-Mail: bill@otu.org
Bill's Web site: www.Billsizemore.net

Bill's Archives

When A Trial By Jury Is A Farce

By Bill Sizemore, NewsWithViews.com

7-3-04 -- My first experience with a jury trial was a real eye-opener. I had no idea of the extent to which judges sometimes make this basic, constitutional right a total farce.

The theory behind the right to a trial by jury is that before a citizen is deprived of liberty or property, the accused will be tried before a panel of his or her peers, who will hear the evidence from both sides and render a decision based upon the facts, as they perceive them.

In theory, the jury is the “fact finder” in the case. However, that is not always the way it works in real life. Sometimes, the judge manipulates the jury to insure that the conclusion it reaches is the one he desires.

However, if a judge can arbitrarily determine the outcome of a trial, simply by controlling what evidence a jury hears, a trial by a jury of one’s peers is a farce. After all, it is not really a trial by jury, if the jurors only hear what the judge lets them hear. It is still a trial by a single judge.

There are valid reasons why some “evidence” should be admissible and some not. Trials would go on forever, if both sides could present all the evidence they wanted, regardless of relevance. Someone has to decide whether evidence is relevant or prejudicial, but therein lies the rub. The one who decides what evidence the jury will hear, in reality has total control of the outcome, because a judge can manipulate a jury the same way an editor can manipulate public opinion, simply by editing the evidence and limiting what the hearer hears.

Let me give you an example of how this works, from personal experience. In 2002, Oregon Taxpayers United, an organization I once headed, was sued by two teachers unions, which claimed that they were forced to spend approximately a million dollars fighting two ballot measures. The unions claimed among other things that the measures were placed on the ballot by means of forgeries. (Actually, the public employee unions collectively spent more than $5 million fighting the two measures, but they thought they had a better chance of winning in court, if they had the “school teachers” sue us.)

In the course of the trial, the teachers union lawyers presented to the jury persuasive evidence of approximately a dozen to two dozen forgeries on petition sheets; all “collected” by one person. We never disputed that the signatures were forged. In fact, we stipulated before hand that they were. We simply claimed that we had no prior knowledge that the signatures had been forged and also that the unions could not have been harmed by this small handful of forgeries.

In our defense, when you collect hundreds of thousands of signatures in a short period of time, as we did, it is not unusual for a few forged signatures to slip through. In fact, it may be inevitable. Forging signatures is like counterfeiting money. It happens, and if the counterfeiter is good enough, it is extremely difficult to catch them.

Because the teachers unions were asking for all of their campaign money back, tripled, as damages, we needed to prove to the jury that one to two dozen forgeries simply could not have caused the unions harm or made them spend all that money.

Our case was not hard to make. We had solid, tangible evidence that the unions were not damaged by that handful of forged signatures. Our problem, however, was not a lack of proof. Our problem was, the judge would not let the jury see the proof.

You see, the same exact matter that was at issue in our case had surfaced regarding another measure in the same election. The same woman, who had forged the signatures on the measures over which the unions were suing us, also had forged about a dozen signatures on another measure.

In that case, after consulting with the attorney general, the secretary of state had issued a statewide press release, stating that he would not keep a measure off the ballot because of a handful of forgeries, if the sponsors had collected enough good signatures to qualify the measure for the ballot. He ordered that the other measure be placed on the ballot, in spite of the forgeries, because the sponsors had collected enough valid signatures.

In our case, we also had collected hundreds of thousands of good signatures; far more than were necessary to qualify for the ballot. The handful of forgeries clearly could not have forced the unions to spend millions campaigning against the measure, because the secretary of state had already declared to the entire state that he would place such measures on the ballot anyway. If you stop and think about it, what other conclusion could he have reached? Why disenfranchise a hundred thousand voters, who had legitimately signed a petition, because of a dozen inconsequential signatures forged by one person?

As I said above, our case really was an easy one to make. To win, all we had to do was show the jury the secretary’s of state press release, which had been quoted in every daily newspaper in the state and prominently featured on the nightly news, and the controversy would end.

Alas, that was not to be. The union lawyers objected to the press release on grounds of hearsay. Fair enough. There was a better source for that information than the secretary’s press release, i.e., the secretary himself.

We would simply subpoena the secretary of state, or someone from his office, to appear in court and answer one simple question: Would the elections division have placed these two measures on the ballot anyway, even if it was known beforehand there were a handful of forgeries?

All the Elections Division had to do was say, “Yes,” and the unions’ claim would be dismissed. But once again, this was not to be.

The secretary of state, a regular recipient of union political donations, claimed that because he had issued the press release based on the advice of the attorney general, the press release was protected by attorney client privilege, and thus inadmissible in court.

How does one respond to such a self-interested dereliction of duty? How does one respond to a claim that a press release, which was published in newspapers across the state and shown on the nightly television news, was somehow confidentially protected by attorney client privilege? Nevertheless, that’s the position our secretary of state took.

In the end, the judge ruled that the jury would not be shown the press release and that the secretary of state would not be allowed to testify, because it would “only confuse the jury.”

He was right about that. That evidence indeed would have confused the jury. The jurors would have wondered what in blazes we were doing in court that day on such a ridiculous charge. They would have wondered how the unions possibly could think that they had been damaged by a mere dozen forgeries out of more than 260,000 signatures collected, if the secretary of state would have placed the measure on the ballot anyway.

Unfortunately, the jurors never saw or heard that evidence. All they saw was indisputable evidence that there were a handful of forgeries on our petition sheets, which made them anxious to punish someone for committing such a terrible crime.

In our case, the jury was manipulated by a liberal judge, who wanted the case to go the unions’ way; a judge who throughout the trial shamelessly gave the unions lawyers every substantive thing they asked for. When push came to shove, he kept from the jury evidence that would have left them no choice, but to find in our favor.

I wonder just how many cases have been manipulated as ours was. I wonder how many times judges have withheld critical evidence from juries, due to personal bias. I wonder how many billions of dollars have changed hands due to such decisions, and how many years innocent people have spent behind bars.

In this country, the right to a trial by a jury of one’s peers is a sacred and indispensable right; guaranteeing that before a citizen is deprived of property or freedom, he can present his defense to a jury of his peers. Like so many other basic rights, however, this one is falling by the wayside, the victim of biased judges.

When a judge withholds critical evidence from a jury, it will not be lady justice, who has on the blindfold. It will be the jury itself, and the jury trial so conducted will be little more than a sham.

Reprinted with Permission