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4th District, Position 2
Laura Maurer Rowan
Four judicial seats on the Multnomah County circuit bench are contested this year, an unusually large number. Among them is a seat held for the past 25 years by Judge Nan Waller. One of the most respected figures in the county courthouse, Waller presides over the mental health court—and she decides whether defendants are mentally competent to stand trial or should be sent to Oregon State Hospital instead. That would be a demanding task anywhere, but in Portland, where the failures of the behavioral health system are evident on most sidewalks, it is herculean. Waller will be greatly missed.
Five candidates seek the job. We found them to be an impressive bunch, far more so than most of the politicians who pass through our office. Anit Jindal, 39, is a partner at Markowitz Herbold PC who defended the gun control laws that voters approved in Measure 114. He’s a widely respected litigator. Diane Sykes, 56, has a long career in civil rights litigation—including a stint as civil rights director at the Oregon Department of Justice—and is the favorite of the plaintiffs bar. Juliet Britton, 53, is a former Army judge advocate general who set up a respected drug court as a Beaverton municipal judge; her expertise in the overlap of criminal justice and addiction treatment would be valuable.
But our decision ultimately came down to Chris Behre and Laura Maurer Rowan—a defense lawyer and a prosecutor, respectively.
Behre, 48, is a public defender who helped former Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt build a program called STEP, which allows people convicted of violent offenses to avoid prison time if they commit to behavioral health treatment. WW’s reporting suggests it was one of the more successful reforms of Schmidt’s polarizing tenure. Mauer Rowan, 43, is a senior assistant attorney general at the Oregon Department of Justice, where she argues for the state in post-conviction relief proceedings (cases where people argue their convictions should be overturned for reasons like inadequate representation). The daughter of two judges, she’s largely worked on the law-and-order side of the ledger, including offering legal advice to the Portland Police Bureau during the 2020 protests and riots. Perhaps that makes her an unlikely recipient of our endorsement. But those who know Mauer Rowan speak glowingly of her ability to listen—an underrated but crucial quality in a judge. We were struck by how many judges who’ve served in the 4th District endorsed her. Among them? Nan Waller. We’ll take her advice and choose Maurer Rowan.
Maurer Rowan’s biggest kitchen fail: She was baking banana bread with her 9-year-old daughter, who added cumin instead of cinnamon. “Then she cried,” Mauer Rowan recalls, “and I got to bake it all on my own.”
4th District, Position 5
Joanna Perini-Abbott
As Multnomah County Circuit Judge Christopher Marshall heads toward retirement, the race to succeed him pits John Casalino, an accomplished prosecutor, against Joanna Perini-Abbott, a law professor with a dual background in civil litigation and federal public defense. The candidates’ distinct but mutually impressive resumés leave voters with a difficult choice.
Casalino, 57, began his legal career with a stint in civil law practice. But his professional identity stands primarily on his long record as a criminal prosecutor. This includes 24 years in the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, where he rose to oversee the family justice division, prosecuting crimes against children. He then arrived at the Oregon Department of Justice, where, as senior assistant attorney general, he trains lawyers, takes on complex criminal cases—homicides and the like, often in rural parts of the state—and was assigned by the attorney general to lead the Klamath County District Attorney’s Office, reeling from a staff shortage and the DA’s resignation. Portland-area prosecutors overwhelmingly back Casalino, and additional endorsements indicate he’s earned the respect of many a judge.
Perini-Abbott, 43, launched her career clerking in federal appellate court and then as a federal public defender in Wisconsin. Arriving in Portland, she joined megafirm Perkins Coie, where she kept a broad-ranging civil litigation practice in realms spanning from trade secrets to securities fraud. At another firm, she now represents clients in a broad range of complex criminal and civil affairs, but says she also sets aside a quarter of her practicing time to take appointed cases in federal courts, representing criminal defendants who can’t afford a lawyer. Most recently, her position on the Oregon State Bar Board of Bar Examiners led her to Lewis & Clark Law School, where she is by multiple accounts a highly respected professor, training law students and active lawyers in trial craft. And her own endorsements, and observers we spoke with in the legal community, describe her as sharp, decent and hardworking.
While Casalino would be an excellent choice, we give Perini-Abbott the nod for two reasons. First, the Multnomah County courts have several former prosecutors and Perini-Abbott’s broader expertise would add depth. Second, Perini-Abbott’s interview with us and record demonstrate an admirable level of engagement with civil society legal groups, as well as an uncommonly thoughtful outlook on how the law operates—and could operate better—in society writ large. We think she’d be a dynamic new figure on the bench.
Perini-Abbott’s biggest kitchen fail: She left her children unattended during a Zoom call and returned to find them swimming through rice, cereal, pasta, and other sundry grains they’d spilled on the floor.
4th District, Position 12
Peter Klym
One of these four judicial contests is not like the other. In the other three, a seat came open and drew a field of candidates so highly qualified that we struggled to pick one. But in Position 12, a sitting judge has struggled so publicly that she faces a challenger.
That judge is Adrian Brown, who found herself in the headlines last year when Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez said he would no longer try serious felonies in her courtroom because he didn’t find her to be fair or impartial. We typically bristle when prosecutors try to freeze out a judge who doesn’t rule their way. It smacks of political blackballing.
But a closer look suggests something else is going on here. Vasquez’s complaint with Brown, 50, isn’t that she’s soft on crime; it’s that she’s unpredictable and arbitrary. Her challenger, Peter Klym, 39, isn’t a prosecutor but a public defender—and he, too, says her decisions are capricious. Embattled journalists like to fall back on the adage, “If both sides hate you, you must be doing something right”—but it’s not what anybody hopes for in a judge.
Soon after Brown learned she faced a last-minute opponent, she sent a Microsoft Teams message begging her fellow judges to handle her felony trials so she could campaign. The presiding judge of Multnomah County Circuit Court, Judith Matarazzo, issued an immediate rebuke: “We can’t rearrange dockets to allow for more convenient time off. One is either at work or not at work.”
Brown failed to submit a candidate statement to the Oregon Elections Division on time, so she’s not in the Voters’ Pamphlet. (She told the state elections office that her ADHD “does create a barrier to how efficiently I process and execute tasks that may be simple or quick for others.”) She sent distasteful messages to her clerk while presiding over a child abuse case in 2022. Klym says lawyers have waited for Brown to rule on motions for more than a year—even though the uniform trial court rules say matters under advisement must be resolved within 60 days.
We didn’t expect this kind of chaos from Brown. For 13 years, she served as an assistant U.S. attorney until she won this seat in 2020, with our backing. But the embarrassments have piled so high that we’re endorsing Klym, although without great enthusiasm.
By his own telling, Klym decided to run only when he realized Brown had no other challengers. A graduate of Georgetown Law, he worked as a public defender in Multnomah County from 2016 to 2020 before becoming a deputy defender in the Appellate Division for the Oregon Department of Justice. He also serves on the state’s Uniform Trial Court Rules Committee, a body that advises the chief justice on rule changes. We found him a little too cute in our interview—he alluded repeatedly to courthouse displeasure with Brown without identifying who’s complaining—but he has a solid reputation among his fellow lawyers. Klym says he would preside over cases with an even temperament and a fair hand—and in what was a pointed jab at Brown, he said he has the work ethic to cut down on the backlog of cases waiting to be heard.
“I’m running because we need judges that are willing to show up and do the work every day,” Klym said. “I have the background to do the vast majority of work right now.”
We want less drama and more work. Vote for Klym.
Klym’s biggest kitchen fail: He struggles to bake pizzas. Specifically, the first pizza of a pizza party.
4th District, Position 14
Joseph Hagedorn
Six lawyers seek to replace Judge Amy Holmes Hehn in this Multnomah County Circuit Court position, which is designated exclusively for family law cases—think child custody disputes, divorce, juvenile neglect, and other expressions of families in crisis.
The candidates include Michael Lee, 37, a Multnomah County prosecutor on the juvenile unit; Bradford Gerke, 51, an experienced family law attorney; Kristine Almquist, 49, a former public defender who now serves as a full-time referee/judge pro tem—basically a judge—in Multnomah County Juvenile Court; Heidi Brown, 62, a former public defender and family law attorney who now works in the Portland City Attorney’s Office; and Elizabeth Savage, 46, a former teacher-turned-family law attorney and part-time judge pro tem of good repute.
All have respectable endorsements; most have experience that would qualify them for this job. (Lee, a genial and impressive fellow backed by his boss, Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vazquez, seemed like the most awkward fit for family court, emphasizing multiple times his “decisiveness”—a quality he attributes in part to his military background.)
Still, in a competitive field, the stand-out candidate is Joseph Hagedorn, 53. Like Almquist, he already serves as a full-time judge pro tem in the Multnomah County Juvenile Court. His professional history—doing legal aid for domestic violence cases and as a public defender—speak to a sensibility well suited to the family law bench. And he has the wide respect of his colleagues. When we asked his competitors whom they would pick if not themselves, Hagedorn easily won out.
Hagedorn’s biggest kitchen fail: Baking his own wedding cake on a dare. On the big day, underneath a skylight, it “just started collapsing.”
WHAT’S NEXT? If a candidate gets 50% plus one vote, they assume office Jan. 4. If not, the top two have a runoff in November.
