After an independent review of hundreds of cases, the Wasco County district attorney is asking the courts to dismiss or expunge 169 misdemeanor and felony convictions involving a disgraced former city of The Dalles police officer.
District Attorney Matt Ellis asked the FA:IR Law Project, a program of the Oregon Justice Resource Center that works to address systemic failures in the criminal justice system, to review 251 cases involving officer Jeffrey Kienlen going back 10 years.
“The documents we examined showed a clear pattern of aggressive behavior, unreliable investigative work, and poor recordkeeping. Often, other officers were present to see Kienlen behaving badly,” FA:IR Law Project’s report says. “Such institutional problems cannot be adequately addressed on a case-by-case basis; instead, we need broad changes that get closer to the roots.”
The organization recommended dismissing cases or expunging convictions in 169 of those cases. Ellis said his office has started asking the court to take action on the cases and some have already been dismissed or expunged.
Days after taking office and replacing Eric Nisley in January 2021, Ellis found a decadeold disciplinary letter in Nisley’s desk drawer. The letter, written by then Police Chief Jay Waterbury in February 2011, said he was demoting Kienlen for lying about where he was staying on a work trip.
“If you are not truthful, you have no integrity. Without integrity you can’t be a good police officer,” wrote Waterbury, who was chief of police in The Dalles for 20 years. “You’re a sergeant, yet tell your officers falsehoods. Because of things like this, you can’t wonder why you have lost respect of the officers.”
It was the second time Kienlen had been disciplined and caught lying. The discipline letter and Kienlen’s pattern of dishonesty, should have been disclosed to defense attorneys under a 1963 Supreme Court ruling requiring prosecutors to turn over all material which might exonerate a defendant. Officers with documented histories of lying are usually added to what’s known as a Brady list and not allowed to testify in court.
“I don’t know how good an officer is if I can’t call him as a witness,” Ellis said.
Ellis added Kienlen to his office’s Brady list when he discovered the letter and Kienlen was fired soon after.
“The Dalles City Police handled it very appropriately. They got rid of him,” he said, wondering why it took so long. “Where were those checks and why was he able to stay out there?”
Ellis also filed ethics complaints with the Oregon State Bar against Nisley and Leslie Wolf, his chief deputy district attorney. Nisley had faced discipline in the past. His law license was suspended for 60 days after he was caught lying to investigators looking into whether he had inappropriately investigated a county official.
Of the 197 cases the FA:IR Law Project recommended be dismissed or expunged, they said Ellis agreed on all of them except for 10. In those instances, Ellis said he was able to review the testimony from the victims and didn’t think convictions hinged on Kienlen’s reports or testimony.
“The difficulty we ran into is that grand jury recordation didn’t come along until about 2018 or 2019,” Ellis said. “We have a lot of cases where I can’t go back and listen to the grand jury even when the victim testified.”
The report includes personal accounts of people who had been intimidated and assaulted by Kienlen as well as one woman who, after she said Kienlen falsely arrested her leading to a felony charge, was so afraid of challenging Kienlen and The Dalles police she moved to a neighboring town.
“She believed she might face physical violence in retaliation for fighting her case,” the report reads. “Feeling that she had no real choice, [she] ultimately pleaded guilty to a crime she maintains she did not commit.”
The Dalles’ current police chief, Tom Worthy, who came to the post in April 2021 from the Oregon State Police, months after Kienlen’s discipline history had surfaced, told OPB he knows how important trust is and that his department owns their shortcomings.
“We also further recognize that trust is hard to gain and it’s easy to lose,” Worthy said. “In cases like that it’s a huge disappointment to us for us to think or believe that our community may have diminished faith in us.”
He said they are putting systems in place to make sure officers who exhibit problematic behavior will be identified early and corrected or disciplined if necessary.