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The presiding judge of Multnomah County Circuit Court has rebuked a fellow circuit judge who asked her colleagues to fill in for her on trials so she’d have more time to spend on her reelection campaign.
The Oregonian first reported Monday afternoon that Circuit Judge Adrian Brown asked via Microsoft Teams message for her fellow judges to step into her scheduled rotation conducting misdemeanor domestic violence trials. “None of us should be expected to be in trial while being tried in an election challenge,” Brown wrote in a message independently obtained by WW. “Indeed it’s an impossibility. I wouldn’t wish this on any of us. And I need your help if you are able.”
Brown sent that message at 10:47 am Friday, April 3. A message newly obtained by WW shows that Presiding Judge Judith Matarazzo kiboshed her request five hours later.
“I would like to remind everyone that we, as public officials, must be ready and willing to do our jobs everyday unless on vacation or out on sick leave,” Matarazzo wrote at 3:37 pm. “Any campaigning or the like must be done outside of work hours. We can’t rearrange dockets to allow for more convenient time off. One is either at work or not at work.”
Neither Brown nor Matarazzo could be reached by WW for comment on Monday evening. Brown’s campaign spokesperson, Kathleen Stuart, told The Oregonian that Brown had done nothing wrong. “She looks forward to being present for the work she loves—presiding over her courtroom and all the cases she is elected to hear,” Stuart said.
Brown is a former civil rights coordinator for the U.S. Attorney’s Office of Oregon who was elected to an open circuit court seat over a crowded field in 2020. She appears to have been surprised to receive an election challenge from public defender Peter Klym. “As you may know,” she wrote in the Microsoft Teams message, “an attorney filed just 30 minutes before the deadline to challenge my reelection, with no notice. I have been on leave this week, not on vacation with my family as I had planned for the last year, but instead at home working well over 50 hours just to ramp up my team, and my campaign.”
Brown is a particularly vulnerable incumbent. Last May, Multnomah County District Attorney Nathan Vasquez announced his office would no longer argue Measure 11 felony cases in her courtroom, saying she could not be trusted to be impartial. County prosecutors have frozen out judges before when their rulings displeased them—most recently, in 2017, they did it to Matarazzo.
