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A law firm that regularly sues the city on behalf of protesters and other citizens alleging police misconduct is now representing five Portland city councilors in an ethics case.
All six members of the council’s progressive caucus—called Peacock—are now under investigation by the Oregon Government Ethics Commission for an August retreat. The ethics commission voted 7-0 on Friday to investigate the meeting and whether anything the councilors discussed during it violated public meetings law, which says that a quorum of councilors cannot discuss any policy in private that may reasonably come before the council or a council committee. Councilors maintain they did not talk about any policy-related matters.
Ben Haile, a lawyer with the Oregon Justice Resource Center, represented five of the six councilors in front of the ethics commission. He’s working pro bono, he told WW in a brief phone call on Tuesday.
“I’m doing it because I want to work to protect democracy, and I think these people are part of a great new experiment that might get undermined by federal overreach,” Haile tells WW. “I do that as part of my work with the OJRC.”
He is representing Councilors Candace Avalos, Mitch Green, Sameer Kanal, Tiffany Koyama Lane and Angelita Morillo. (He is not representing the sixth member of the progressive caucus, Jamie Dunphy.)
Haile’s representation of the Peacock councilors is peculiar for a few reasons.
OJRC, a civil rights law firm founded in 2011 to “improve legal representation for communities that have often been underserved in the past,” typically works in civil litigation related to inmate rights, wrongful conviction, police misconduct and excessive use of force and other social justice areas. There’s nothing to suggest that OJRC regularly represents elected officials in front of the state’s ethics commission.
But more importantly, OJRC regularly represents clients who are suing the city. OJRC has represented a handful of protesters and journalists who have sued the city alleging police misconduct and excessive use of force during the 2020 racial justice protests. In most of those cases, the city and OJRC have settled outside of court, with the city paying substantial settlement amounts to the plaintiffs. (Street Roots reported earlier this year that claims stemming from the 2020 protests have cost the city $9.1 million so far in settlements.)
OJRC has also represented victims of Portland police misconduct. This summer, the City Council voted to approve a $3.75 million settlement awarded to the family of Immanueal “Manny” Jaquez Clark-Johnson, whom a Portland police officer shot in the back in November 2022 after he was mistaken for a robbery suspect. OJRC represented Clark-Johnson’s family.
The City Council is the final level of approval for every settlement over $50,000 that the city seeks to reach, and councilors can elect to increase the settlement amount if they choose. That means OJRC not infrequently has business in front of the City Council—and usually as an adversary.
Tung Yin is a professor of law at Lewis and Clark Law School. He says that OJRC representing plaintiffs seeking settlements from the city, and representing city councilors raises questions about a perceived or real conflict of interest.
“It’s when we have these two things together that we have this appearance of conflict,” Yin says. “It really is a question of: Does it look like the councilors might make decisions on behalf of the public that would benefit the same lawyers who are representing them pro bono?”
While approving settlements on behalf of the city has often been treated by prior city councils as a pro forma affair, the new City Council has shown an appetite for bucking the city attorney’s recommendation and increasing the dollar amount. Most notably, the council voted unanimously earlier this year to increase a settlement from $2 million to $8.5 million for descendants of Black families displaced from the Albina neighborhood due to urban renewal.
Oregon law prohibits elected officials from accepting gifts of over $50 from “sources that could reasonably be known to have a legislative or administrative interest in the vote or decision of the public official who holds any official position or office.” It’s not clear if free legal services meet the definition of a “gift” under state statutes, but the laws do identify a gift as “something of economic value.”
Councilor Tiffany Koyama Lane declined to answer questions about Haile’s representation of Peacock, and other councilors did not respond to similar questions.
Haile declined to answer WW’s questions whether he or his firm had represented elected officials before in front of the ethics commission. But he said in a statement that “all of our legal work, advocacy, and public education…is consistent with our mission, mandates as a civil rights organization, and our work to defend democracy. As a resource center, we take great pride being available to those who seek to defend the rights and dignity of Oregonians.”
OJRC did not respond to questions from WW.
