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Lawrence Taylor, a Portland defense attorney, says it's the most amazing thing he's seen in 22 years of practice.
Thursday, Taylor's 27-year-old client, Castor Conley, was facing a felony conviction for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle if he couldn't come up with $983 in restitution for his victim.
Colin M. Murphy, a lawyer in Judge Stephen Bushong's chamber that day on an entirely different matter, sat in the courtroom wondering what others probably did as well: Would Conley have the cash to avoid a strike on his record with life-long consequences?
But when it became clear that Conley did not have the money, Murphy made an unusual decision, one that he says he preferred went unrecognized. Murphy, a civil litigator, volunteered to pay restitution for Conley, a complete stranger. (He did so after consulting an ethics expert at the Oregon State Bar who said it would be OK; ethics rules would prohibit a lawyer from paying his own client's restitution.)
Murphy says it was a no-brainer. He says he saw a young African American man in the courthouse whose job and housing prospects would be negatively impacted for the rest of his life. Meanwhile, Kevin Demer, the prosecutor on the case with the Multnomah County District Attorney's office, had offered to knock down Conley's charge to a misdemeanor if he paid up.
Conley, who has a 17-month-old child, has not yet responded to WW's request for comment.
"To me it was simply, 'I can help someone,'" Murphy tells WW. "So why not?"
He added: "I did not expect anyone to hear about it."
Taylor says it's the ordinary nature of the consequences his client faced—where am I going to live and how am I going to pay for it?—that makes Murphy's generosity so extraordinary. A felony conviction "could have done a lot of damage," Taylor says. "This really did him a lot of good."
Taylor added: "It made me feel like it's Christmas. There are good people out there."
WWeek 2015