Judge Michael Marcus, Multnomah County Circuit Court

Judge Marcus attended the University of California at Berkeley for both his undergraduate and legal education. Undergraduate started in 1961, with graduation from Boalt Hall in 1969. As a student at Berkeley in the’60s he was exposed to new ideas and the whole concept of a person’s role in shaping behavior of one’s government. He worked as a clerk for Raymond Peters on the California Supreme Court and then went to Legal Assistance in San Francisco for four years. Judge Marcus practiced another 16 years with Legal Aid in Portland , from 1974 until his appointment as a judge in March of 1990.

His legal aid practice emphasized complex and appellate litigation in typical poverty law subject areas.  His significant cases as included the closure of Edgefield Manor, a controversial case involving the rights of Medicaid patients in nursing homes. He also had a lot of involvement in a number of landlord and tenant cases; Brewer vs. Erwin is perhaps the most well known of those.  Beginning in 1975, he wrote and advocated for legislative and administrative attention to such diverse issues as exemption rights (including the homestead exemption), housing issues, and nursing home transfers.  He became an informal resource for the legislature on civil procedure issues, a role that he continued for eight years on the Council on Court Procedures after he became a judge.

As a judge, cases are significant by their importance to the parties or the nature of the issues they involve. Probably one of his most significant cases involved a motion for new trial after a robbery conviction based on the racial prejudice of a juror, announced during deliberations. He granted a new trial. What is engaging about this job is that there is no end to the fascinating cases… “[T]he wannabee Skinhead that I sentenced to an un-learning racism workshop who discovered that he was part Native American; it changed his entire state of mind,” said Judge Marcus.  He has also presided over cases involving constitutional issues involved in drug free zones, gang-related murder, sex abuse by a juvenile probation worker, and evolving issues of administrative law in the context of a challenge to the Umatilla Weapons incinerator.

He became a judge because he saw some things done by some judges so badly, in terms of his concept of the relationship between the role of courts and human dignity, that he felt that he needed to do it.  Judge Marcus believes that “the most positive aspect is the ability to achieve something by struggling to make the process serve a purpose.”

For over a decade, he has sought to move the culture of sentencing towards evidence-based harm reduction.  To that end, he has promoted legislation, judicial conference resolutions, technology in the form of sentencing support tools, and judicial education projects.  He has published articles in journals, and bar, corrections, and criminal justice periodicals.  He maintains a website entitled “smartsentencing.com.”

Originally authored by Philip Hornik and printed in the May 1995 Multnomah Lawyer
Updated for the Internet in 2007