JUDGE DREAD

It is all about endorphins, as Judge Dorothy Baker proselytizes to anyone who will listen--and some who won't. This is clear one early-July afternoon in the third-floor courtroom that for Multnomah County's drunk drivers is often the last call before jail.

"Almost everybody has some sort of underlying endorphin imbalance," she is explaining to a Mexican immigrant who, despite the translator at his side, does not seem to grasp the connection between Baker's biological discourse and the metal handcuffs around his wrists.

"Do you know what endorphins are?" the auburn-haired judge continues. "They're chemicals in your body. When you drink alcohol, it starts to produce serotonin; it makes you feel good."

"How much do you drink?" she asks the man, who has been charged with DUII, or "driving under the influence of intoxicants."

"I don't drink a lot," he says.

Baker's eyes narrow as she leans closer, her gaze locked on the man's face. "You don't drink a lot," she repeats after him. "How often do you drink?"

"Every two weeks," he says.

"Every two weeks!" Baker exclaims, then leans back, shifts her glasses on top of her head and gapes at him in stark disbelief. "I'm going to call you a liar on that, because statistically that's impossible. You've got three DUIs in 10 years."

"Let's get a polygraph in here, Amy," Baker calls out crisply to her clerk. "He's pissing me off!"

For the past two decades Baker has been Multnomah County's most controversial, feared and mercurial judge. She now rules over a courtroom considered to be unlike any other in this country: a DUII program for repeat offenders in which they essentially surrender every aspect of their lives to Baker's strict oversight in return for a reduced jail sentence.

Sometimes benevolent, sometimes draconian, she fears neither criminals nor lawyers and is proud that, despite many threats to do so, she's never had to actually hold an attorney in contempt. Says Baker, "It's all about control, isn't it?"

Today, however, the 57-year-old finds herself in a new and distinctly uncomfortable situation, one that she cannot control, thanks to a shaggy, unemployed beauty-supply vendor named Scott Stebbeds.

A year ago, Stebbeds' sister filed a complaint with the state agency that investigates judges' misconduct, the Commission on Judicial Fitness and Disability, based on the way Baker treated her brother. That complaint sparked an investigation that, though Baker contends it is going nowhere, is clearly getting under her skin.

"You're going to make me mad--oh, this is just enough to frost my cupcake!" she says, when first asked about the complaint. "This case has been my nemesis, like an albatross around my head."

Judge Baker's unconventional tactics highlight the age-old question: At what point does the end justify the means? As one probation officer--a fan of Baker--puts it, "The public is safer because she is on the bench. But I would say Dorothy is unencumbered by the Constitution."

Some lawyers say Dorothy Baker is unbalanced, unjudgelike and out of control. Defendants chafe at her stiff sentences and habitual harangues.

Others say she is smart, heroic and fair, and there's little doubt that she's saved many lives. More than lives, says Josh Arnold, her former clerk: "Judge Baker is about nothing less than saving people's souls."

Her program is considered so successful that the feds are funding a five-year study of its effectiveness to see whether it can serve as a model.

"I've not seen a judge anywhere that has as compassionate and direct an approach as Judge Baker," says Wayne Reece, an Atlanta lawyer who trains court employees and cops about DUII issues. "In my opinion, she's the best in the country right now."

The county's DUII Intensive Supervision Program, known as DISP, requires that repeat offenders neither drink nor drive, let alone do both. Baker makes participants, who volunteer for the program, sell their cars and wear an electronic arm bracelet to track their whereabouts. They're subject to random tests on a breathalyzer installed on their telephone. They also must pay for random urinalysis tests and polygraphs, in which they are grilled about their drinking, driving and drug use.

The program often requires psychological exams, counseling and medication. To Baker, the link between the medical and criminal-justice worlds is key. Just last week, for example, a longtime gangbanger in her program was revealed by an exam to suffer from paranoid schizophrenia, paving the way for medication to help curb his tendency toward drugs and crime.

"Every one of these people has some underlying issue," Baker says. "I think that it's just damn high time that the medical community and the legal community got together and figured out what causes people to do what they do, and what they can do to change the behavior."

Baker points to studies showing that imbalances in a person's levels of natural painkillers, called endorphins, fuel alcoholism and drug addiction--which in turn fuel crime. So her program requires activities shown to increase the body's production of endorphins--like socializing, self-esteem building, hobbies, volunteering and exercise.

Though she wears a judge's black robe, Baker shuns the official raised bench from which every other Multnomah County jurist holds court. This allows her to sit next to program participants at the wooden counsel table, hunched forward to look up rather than down at them. It also allows her to practice what she calls "motivational intervention interviewing," where she places her face inches from theirs, grabs their arms to make a point, and generally invades their space to make a personal connection. One part social worker, one part scolding Mother from Hell, Baker is seemingly unafraid to cross any personal boundary.

Look fat? Baker will lean toward you, look you in the eye and say you're lying about doing your exercises. To prove her wrong, a suspiciously pudgy DISPer recently visited Baker's chambers in a T-shirt and shorts, then sweated his way through 30 minutes of Tae Bo--the kickboxing-based aerobic program he claimed to have been doing regularly. "He barely made it," recalls Katye Landis, the DISP program's coordinator.

Last week, Baker had a brainstorm as an immigrant defendant left her courtroom: "You're going to have to learn English perfectly if you're in this program!" she calls after him. "Because if you don't know English, you're not going to get the perfect job!"

That same day, a single mom tells Baker she is pregnant again. "I want you to stop having kids, OK? Five is enough," says Baker.

Later, Baker can't believe what her clerk tells her, that another of her charges put romance ahead of employment. "He quit his job so he could go on a honeymoon? I need to talk to him--that's crazy! Tell him I'm not putting up with this crap from him."

Her tough-love harshness is interspersed with words of encouragement and affection, but there are also yelling and door-slamming tantrums, which give rise to frequent speculation about Baker's own endorphin levels.

"I've seen so many examples of her going off the deep end for little or no reason," says one lawyer. "It often appears to be arbitrary. It often appears to be personal.... Her attitude is, if you don't play ball with her she's going to hammer you as hard as she can, regardless of how much sense it makes."

"It's really a quandary whether to recommend to clients that they enter the program," says another lawyer. "You never know which Baker is going to show up."

Baker maintains that her tirades are all for effect, calculated to knock participants out of a comfort zone built through years of lies, denial and self-delusion.

"I treat everyone differently because everyone is different. I'm unconventional, because I demand that people do what they're supposed to do. I don't put up with incompetence, and I don't like liars," she says. "People say I'm unpredictable, but I disagree with that. They need to pay attention."

A logger's daughter who grew up in small-town Sequim, Wash., a former waitress and majorette who was voted her high school's future homemaker of the year, Baker worked her way through college and law school while raising two kids.

After graduating Northwestern Law School at Lewis & Clark in 1975, she started as a prosecutor, then moved into criminal defense, then divorce law. She ran successfully for judge in 1981, then gained unwelcome recognition three years later, when an Oregonian poll of Multnomah County lawyers ranked her as the county's third-worst judge.

In 1987, she found herself appearing on CNN's Crossfire and Good Morning America, thanks to her controversial sentencing of repeat child molester Richard Bateman. Before anyone in the country had ever heard of sex-offender notification, much less made it the law, Baker sentenced Bateman to sport a sign on both his car and his home's front door: "Dangerous sex offender, no children allowed."

In the '90s, Presiding Judge Donald Londer had her run the misdemeanor and drug dockets, where she drew praise from some for running a tight ship, but also criticism for pressuring lawyers to get their clients to plea-bargain to help relieve the court's backlog of cases.

Though Baker is still proud of her success in that post, she says she started to burn out and have doubts about how much good mere jail sentences were doing the defendants. "I'd tell them, 'Don't do this again,' and then they'd come back--and I'd go, 'Why'd you do that!?' Duh, and it didn't work."

In 1998, she got a call from longtime DUII probation officer Doug Brown, asking her to head a new program for repeat drunk drivers. She jumped at the chance and immediately launched herself into finding everything she could about the topic of alcoholism, even paying her own way to attend a national conference of the Research Society on Alcoholism, a group of scientists and treatment providers. "I went to the conference, and it was like this"--she uses two fingers on each hand to hold her eyelids back and make her eyeballs pop--"Whoa!"

As head of DISP, Baker no longer handles trials, instead doing only pleas, sentencing and follow-up for DUI offenders.

There are 800 people enrolled in the DISP program, which has had about 90 graduates. Only a little more than 1 percent of its members have reoffended after graduation, according to the judge--far below the national rate of 38 percent.

To study what sentences are effective at curbing crime, Multnomah County Judge Michael Marcus has made it his mission to track the rates at which people reoffend in Multnomah County. He says Baker's program is clearly far more successful than either treatment or jail time at getting people to change their ways. "She's very intense, she's very directed, and she's very effective for most people," he said. "She has saved more lives than most judges."

Given the gravity of her goal, Baker's hearings are deceptively casual: She is wont to veer into personal conversations about her ex-husband or her recent trip to visit family in Alaska, where, she is happy to say, she caught halibut, saw moose and eagles, and filleted 17 salmon in record time. A former youth soccer coach, twice married and twice divorced, Baker is a smoker and self-described light drinker with a fondness for Irish coffees. She lives in Washington County, where she is a ferocious gardener and does all her own home repairs. "I love power tools," she says.

"A lot of the success of this program is driven by the judge's personality and her nontraditional style," says Fred Lenzser, a chief deputy district attorney. "In all honesty, I don't see anyone else running the program as effectively as she does."

Lenzser says Baker is the judge most feared among the defendants he sees. He recalls reading a police report of a man arrested for DUII while on probation under Baker: "The first thing out of his mouth was, 'Don't make me go back and face Judge Baker!'"

Carol McNannee, a Hawaiian who sits on the national board of directors for Mothers Against Drunk Driving, says, "From the national MADD perspective, we wish that there could be Judge Bakers in communities across the country."

The idea of Judge Baker cloned and multiplied is enough to give many defense lawyers nightmares. More than her mercurial temperament, it's her creative interpretation of legal procedure that sets them on edge.

"She has no regard for due process," said one lawyer, who, like many interviewed for this article, spoke on condition of anonymity, citing fear of retribution. "She thinks she has superior intuition--and makes her decisions based on that, when she doesn't have the evidence."

In the past 10 years, the Oregon Court of Appeals has questioned Baker's actions three times. In all three, she threatened the defendants with harsh jail sentences in order to move things along more quickly--at the expense of either their right to legal representation or, more fundamentally, their right to plead not guilty.

In 1997, for instance, it found that she had inappropriately denied a request for a new court-appointed lawyer made by a man accused of drug offenses, who felt his attorney was biased against him because she'd called him a "fucker."

"I wonder why?" responded Baker, adding that if he was going to insist on a new lawyer, she'd throw him in jail for the two weeks until trial.

Today, Baker downplays the significance of all three reversals (not an unusually high number), saying they were just a matter of not crossing Ts, or, as she calls it, "sprinkling enough holy water" on her decisions.

"I work really hard on remembering why I'm doing what I'm doing," she says. "I have a test for everything I've done, every sentence: I discuss it with myself all the way home in the car; I discuss it with myself in the morning in the shower; I discuss it with myself on the way to work."

Michelle Geiger disagrees with Baker's self-assessment. Geiger appeared before Baker last month to enter a plea on a DUII arrest and made the mistake of showing up to court drunk. Baker brought in a breathalyzer and threw her in jail for eight days.

"As far as I could determine, there was no valid basis for holding her," says her attorney, Mark Gorski. Other lawyers say Baker's conduct fell in a gray area of the law, since Geiger was not yet convicted and had not driven to court. "Judge Baker is like, freaked out," says Geiger. "She thinks she's above the law."

Asked hypothetically what he would do if someone showed up drunk in his courtroom to enter a plea, Judge Marcus says, "as far as I'm concerned, I have no basis to throw them in jail merely because they are intoxicated."

Baker maintains that Geiger's jailing was legally sound. "What would you like me to do?" says Baker. "Would you like me to let a person who had a .20 blood-alcohol level walk across the street and get hit by a car?"

Scott Stebbeds seemed perfect for Judge Baker's program. A hardened abuser of alcohol, he had been able to endanger Portlanders for years as a self-described habitual drunk driver.

"I drank about every day," says Stebbeds, who sold nail supplies to beauty salons and helped set up salons for other people. "I didn't have any respect for life."

Prior to 1999, Stebbeds was arrested for driving drunk four times, but he was only convicted once, in 1991. He says he beat the other three thanks to lawyers, tricks and technicalities.

In 1999 came his fifth DUII arrest, when he was nabbed by an off-duty cop for doing 75 mph on McLoughlin Boulevard, racing to catch the fourth quarter of a Blazers game. Given a choice between a stiff jail sentence and entering Baker's program, Stebbeds says he jumped at the opportunity to turn things around. Court records show he attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, got therapy, and passed every urinanalysis, every polygraph, every random breathalyzer.

In the end Stebbeds' downfall was not a cocktail, but a hamburger: specifically, the $1.95 hamburger available only during happy hour in the lounge area of McCormick's Fish House and Bar, down the street from his office in Beaverton.

Baker spotted him walking into the lounge there with two friends on the night of May 5, 2001. Probationers are not allowed to go to bars or taverns, and the judge ordered him to leave immediately and report to her office Monday morning.

There, he had his license confiscated and was sentenced to spend a weekend in jail.

It's not unusual that Baker's actions would leave a defendant feeling wronged. In this case, however, Stebbeds had a sister who knew how to strike back: Pam Knowles, who served as executive director of the state's Judicial Fitness Commission for seven years, through November 2000. Knowles filed a complaint with her former agency two months after Stebbeds' jailing, alleging that the judge threw a tantrum in the lounge that night. To support it, she submitted witness statements from two of Stebbeds' friends and Baker's waitress that suggested the judge was intoxicated.

"My first thought was, 'Who is that drunk chick?" wrote Stebbeds' friend Dave Johnson, who claimed that the judge was screaming as she approached Stebbeds that night.

A similar tale is told by Baker's waitress, Pam Mitchell, who is a friend of a friend of Stebbeds. "He walked in, and she flew out of her booth," Mitchell told WW. "She was screaming at him.... She had had a couple of cocktails."

The complaint contends that Stebbeds was not adequately notified of his need for a lawyer, and that the judge was not impartial and should have recused herself from the probation-violation hearing.

"Dorothy was the judge, the witness, the jury and the prosecutor," Knowles says.

Stebbeds says the judge became openly hostile after that incident, asking questions about his past that he felt were intrusive. He says the conditions she placed on him hurt his business, Northwest Nail Source, which shut down three months ago.

"What would I like to see happen? I'd like to see Judge Baker disbarred," he says. " I don't think that her methods are sound. I think she's unbalanced, unfit, disrespectful and cruel."

Proceedings of the Judicial Fitness Commission are a closely held secret, but the tiny agency--which employs only a half-time executive director and a quarter-time secretary--gets more than 100 complaints a year, of which typically just two are found to be serious enough to merit a hearing.

It's not known whether Stebbeds' complaint will reach that level. WW contacted several lawyers and former judges familiar with the commission process and characterized the complaint. Because Stebbeds was on probation and had reduced rights, some said it fell into a gray area and that Baker's alleged public tantrum was the more serious of the two charges.

"To me, that would be a problem--just because it shows such bad judgment," says Jim Mountain, a lawyer with Harrang Long Gary Rudnick, who has both prosecuted and defended cases before the commission. "That lowers the litigants' faith that they're getting a fair deal, and it lowers the public's confidence in the judicial system."

The judge, for her part, says the complaint was an effort to manipulate the process orchestrated by Knowles, whom she considers one of Stebbeds' "enablers." Citing a witness statement of her own, by a friend who was with her that night, Baker says she did nothing wrong, did not scream in the tavern and had not even had a drink--she'd ordered one, but it had not yet arrived. "There is no one in this town who has ever seen me intoxicated, or ever will," she says.

Knowles insists Baker was out of bounds: "I consider the complaint very serious," she says, "or else I would not have filed it."

Ultimately, where you draw the line on Baker's actions depends where you're sitting.

Last week, as usual, members of Baker's program paraded in and out of courtroom, sometimes just to chat, say hi to the judge or announce, smiling, that they'd gotten a job. Russell Grayson, 66, was among them--bringing the judge sadder news: His brain cancer, long in remission, had shot into overdrive. Doctors say he can expect to live only another six months.

Grayson says that if not for Baker, he would either be already dead or in prison.

"A lot of people hate her because she's so stern, but I think too many judges are lenient these days," he says. "She made me face the facts about who I was and what I was doing."

Now, he says, he will die in peace, a better person. "I'd been drinking for over 50 years, but now it's a different world out there," he says. "These have really been the best three years I've had in my life."

There are more than 3,000 alcohol- related arrests in Multnomah County each year and more than 5,000 alcohol- related crashes that cause injury or death. The district attorney's office averages about 1,800 DUII convictions each year.

According to the Oregon Department of Transportation, alcohol- related fatalities in Multnomah County have dropped from 35 in 1998 to 21 in 2001, a drop of 40 percent. That's more than twice the decrease in the rest of the state.

The habitual drunk drivers targeted by Judge Dorothy Baker's program are responsible for as much as one-third of alcohol- involved accidents and fatalities, authorities say.

Baker was one of three judges featured in an article in the latest issue of

, the national magazine of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

In 1988, Baker aroused the ire of radical anti- abortionists while presiding over a trial of a protester who blocked a clinic door, causing one of them, Paul DeParrie, to author a newsletter article titled "Judge Dorothy Baker: Clear and Present Danger."

In 1995 Baker made headlines by sending former Multnomah County prosecutor Roger Weidner, a perennial political candidate and judicial critic, to the state psychiatric hospital for four months after three psychiatrists found him delusional.

The current study of Baker's program is funded by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and conducted through OHSU and New Mexico's Behavioral Research Center of the Southwest. Participants will get a variety of probation conditions to see what works.

WWeek 2015