A Brush With Measure 11

[February 20th, 2008]

An appeal last week to the state Supreme Court may be the final chance for justice for a former Boys and Girls Club staffer, found guilty of sexual assault in a case one ex-cop calls the worst travesty of justice he’s seen in 20 years as an investigator.

If the court refuses to take up the case or rules against 27-year-old Veronica Rodriguez, she’ll go to prison for five more years, after already serving one year for a crime she denies committing.

“I feel like a fountain overflowing on this. I feel as strongly about Veronica’s innocence as anything I have ever investigated in my life, and I am a very seasoned investigator,” says Michael Hintz, a former Tigard police detective who worked for Rodriguez’s defense team.

A Washington County jury found Rodriguez guilty in 2005 of first-degree sexual assault after police accused her of running her hands through a 13-year-old boy’s hair and pulling the back of his head against her covered chest in the middle of a crowded game room at the Boys and Girls Club in Hillsboro.

Under Measure 11, a 1994 voter-approved ballot initiative setting mandatory minimum sentences, Rodriguez faced six years and three months in prison. But Circuit Judge Nancy Campbell gave her 16 months instead, saying the Measure 11 sentence would violate the state constitution as cruel and unusual punishment.

Rodriguez served one year at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville, earning time off for good behavior. Meanwhile, prosecutors appealed her sentence, and in December a three-judge panel at the state Court of Appeals ruled unanimously that Rodriguez should serve out the remaining five years of her Measure 11 sentence. Rodriguez’s appeal of that ruling landed at the Supreme Court on Feb. 13.

Kevin Mannix, the original Measure 11 backer, calls Campbell’s move to override the minimum sentence “absolutely unacceptable,” saying the correct path would be to ask the governor for clemency.

Rodriguez’s conviction destroyed her career as a social worker. A registered sex offender as a result, she’s now living in Spokane with her parents and working as a barista. She tells WW returning to prison would scuttle her plans to go back to school and marry her boyfriend, Kevin Hagen, who stood by her throughout her arrest and trial.

“Trying to rebuild my life, and then going back and having it taken away from me again—it’s a hard thought to deal with,” says Rodriguez, who has no other criminal record. “All I can do is keep fighting my case and have faith that down the road, it will all get straightened out somehow.”

When she was arrested in April 2005, Rodriguez was pursuing a promising career as a youth counselor. The daughter of migrant farmworkers, she says she earned straight A’s at Gonzaga University before moving to Aloha in June 2004 to work at the Boys and Girls Club in Hillsboro, which provides outreach for at-risk youth.

Rodriguez says she developed close relationships with several of the kids, including the alleged victim, a 13-year-old boy from an unstable home who had anger problems and trouble at school. Rodriguez saw the boy and his family almost daily, and admits she broke club rules by spending time alone with him. But she denies any sexual relationship.

In March 2005, a husband and wife who worked at the club went to Hillsboro police to report suspicious activity, including Rodriguez’s relationship with the boy.

Hintz, the defense investigator, and Peter Gartlan, Rodriguez’s public defender, say a long-running dispute between local cops and the head of the club colored the police investigation. Lt. Mike Rouches, spokesman for the Hillsboro police, says cops were frustrated at the time because the club’s management had downscaled their presence at the club. But he says that had nothing to do with the investigation.

The police alleged Rodriguez had romantic relations with AJ Villa, a 17-year-old former club employee, and with the 13-year-old. Both repeatedly denied any wrongdoing by Rodriguez. “Nothing ever did happen, and it was ridiculous that she was even being charged with this,” Villa says.

Rodriguez faced two counts of first-degree sexual assault for alleged incidents with the 13-year-old that happened months before. In one, Rodriguez was alleged to have stood in a bathroom doorway while the boy fondled her breasts. That charge resulted in a hung jury.

But the jury voted 10-2 to convict Rodriguez for allegedly pulling the back of the boy’s head against her chest. Two staff members claimed to have seen it happen, though one changed his story on the stand.

Prosecutors showed the jury emails in which Rodriguez told the boy she loved him. But Hintz says it’s absurd to think they were having an affair. “I’m absolutely convinced that she is innocent.” Hintz says.

Judge Campbell said giving the full Measure 11 sentence would “shock the moral sense of all reasonable persons”—the legal standard for cruel and unusual punishment in Oregon. The Court of Appeals ruled not all reasonable people would be shocked if Rodriguez got six-plus years.

Gartlan wants the Supreme Court to reconsider, saying Rodriguez’s case doesn’t fit with other sexual assaults that merit a stiff sentence.

As Gartlan wrote in his request to the Supreme Court, citing a hypothetical case: “Causing the back of a boy’s head to be placed against the clothed chest of a 23-year-old counselor is qualitatively different from causing a 12-year-old boy to place his tongue or his penis in the family dog’s anus.... The conduct in this case must be one of the mildest, most technical forms of ‘sexual abuse’ that one could contemplate.”