Susan M. Leeson

This case was a wrongful death action in which the plaintiff, as personal representative of the deceased, sued a trucking company after a fatal accident involving its employee’s tractor-trailer. After the jury deadlocked on fault allocation, the trial court gave a supplemental verdict-urging instruction encouraging further deliberation without coercion. The Court of Appeals reversed the resulting verdict, holding the instruction coercive, but the Oregon Supreme Court reversed that decision. The court held that a rule previously announced in a criminal case—requiring verdict-urging instructions to meet certain standards to avoid coercion—extends to civil cases, but applies only prospectively, so the trial court’s instruction did not require reversal here. The case was remanded to the Court of Appeals for further proceedings.

torts & liabilityprocedure

In this criminal case, defendant Chavez, a foreign national, was arrested and read his Miranda rights in Spanish; he requested an attorney but later made incriminating statements that he sought to suppress under the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments as well as the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations (VCCR), which requires authorities to inform arrestees of their right to contact their consulate. The trial court denied the motion to suppress after finding the statements voluntary and no prejudice from the lack of consular notification, and the Court of Appeals affirmed. On review, the Oregon Supreme Court held that the defendant failed to preserve his VCCR argument because his lawyer expressly told the trial court that resolving the Miranda claim would dispose of the VCCR issue and did not assert that the treaty created independent individual rights. The court therefore declined to address the merits of whether the VCCR grants personal rights or whether suppression is an appropriate remedy, and it affirmed the judgment.

criminal lawprocedure

This case involved homeowners who sued the City of Lake Oswego after a city storm drain caused erosion that led to a landslide damaging their property, alleging claims for inverse condemnation (a taking for public use) and negligence. A jury found for the plaintiffs, but the Court of Appeals reversed on grounds of discretionary immunity for the city's decisions about storm drain maintenance. The Oregon Supreme Court reversed the Court of Appeals and remanded, holding that discretionary immunity did not apply because the city had not made any affirmative policy decision or considered the erosion issue in its capital improvement plans; instead, it followed a complaint-driven repair policy without addressing this location. The court emphasized that the evidence supported the jury's findings on both claims when viewed in the light most favorable to the plaintiffs.

propertytorts & liability

The case concerned the interpretation of the phrase 'each unit of property in this state' in Ballot Measure 50, which amended the Oregon Constitution to establish maximum assessed values for property tax purposes based on 1995 real market values reduced by 10 percent, with annual caps on increases. Taxpayer Flavorland Foods argued that land and improvements on its commercial parcel must be treated as separate units for calculating maximum assessed values, while the Washington County Assessor maintained that the unit encompasses the entire property tax account. The Oregon Tax Court granted summary judgment to the taxpayer, but the reviewing court reversed, holding that the phrase refers to all property within a single tax account. The court reasoned that although the text is ambiguous, the context of the existing property tax system, the measure's history replacing Measure 47, and voter intent establish that the account as a whole—including both land and improvements—is the relevant unit for applying the maximum assessed value cap.

taxesproperty

This case is an automatic direct review by the Oregon Supreme Court of a conviction and death sentence for aggravated murder, murder by abuse, sexual penetration, and abuse of a corpse. The defendant was convicted after evidence showed he repeatedly beat, burned, restrained, and otherwise abused a two-and-a-half-year-old child over several months until she died in June 1997, then buried the body. The court affirmed the convictions and death sentence, holding that the evidence supported the jury's findings, that challenged jury-eligibility rules under SB 936 did not violate the Sixth Amendment or Article I, section 11, impartial-jury guarantees, and that the underlying murder statutes were not unconstitutionally vague as to the required mental state.

criminal lawprocedurecivil rights

This case is a ballot title review under ORS 250.085(2) in which petitioner Lon T. Mabon challenged the Attorney General's certified ballot title for Initiative Petition 34 (2002), a proposed constitutional amendment that would add language to Article I, section 1, declaring that God establishes human personhood at fertilization and requiring protection of all innocent human life from that point until natural death. The Oregon Supreme Court held that the caption failed to comply substantially with ORS 250.035(2)(a) because it listed prohibited conduct rather than reasonably identifying the measure's subject matter as stated in the proposal's text. The court referred the ballot title to the Attorney General for modification of the caption while leaving the "yes" and "no" vote result statements and summary unchanged, as no challenge was raised to those segments.

abortionelectionsreligious liberty