By itself, a motion in the Chasse case does not a change of venue make.

Most federale judges take a shot at impaneling a jury first, and will grant a change only if they can't get enough prospective jurors to give the correct "magic answers" about pre trial publicity and pre formed opinions.

PDX deserves to have venue changed to San Francisco.

Nonny, depending which district of federal court a case is being heard in, there can be months and months of pretrial publicity in the papers day in and day out and there will be no change in venue granted. I am talking about a place far East of here.

Pendleton would work for the defense. Eugene for the plaintiff, and Medford is probably a wash. Even Boise is going to give this family money. Too many injuries and not enough evidence of danger to the police from what I can tell. But the press does not usually get the evidence right, and instead pursues a selling story. 12 days of trial will bring out all the details. But no verdict will bring the guy back for his family or repair the damage to their psyches or those of the police officers and their families. No winners here.

LucsAdvo

I think you may have missed my point. San Francisco is not a good venue in which the city would want to be defending. Nor is Seattle.

Those who think the Eugene Division of the District of Oregon would be pro plaintiff need to remember how federal juries are selected. Un like a Lane County Circuit Court jury, the feds pull jurors from all over Southern Oregon, not just Eugene or Lane County A federal Eugene jury won't look like the UofO.

The Pendleton Division is an interesting place. Portland is hated among the folks who form the federal jury pools. And cops aren't necessarily well liked.

Portland needs to be very careful what it asks for. It might get it.

Your correspondent has tried a lot of cases in federal courts in Portland and Eugene, and a few in Pendleton.

I think some Pendleton boosters, like our friend Mike Thorne who used to run the Port of Portland (to best market his Pendleton-grown wheat by arguing for Columbia Channel dredging ), attempt to create the impression that the Umatilla County citizenry is indifferent toward the homeless and mentally ill, but my experience is that most people do care. A recent project to connect the community with very poor and homeless people drew over 100 volunteers and a front page story in the East Oregonian. It is a small clique that wants to run "that element" out of town. At least the EO, unlike the O, doesn't allow a self-interested clique to control the news.

No winners here.

The Chasse family obviously is not doing this for the money. I'm sure the goon-hiders at City Hall have offered them well into seven figures. The Chasses want a trial, airing all the facts that the police have hidden for three years plus with their sham "investigations."

When those facts are exposed to light of day, we will all be winners.

OJ Simpson flashback jitters...horrible to imagine, that this cut-and-dried Chasse case could somehow be highjacked by a legal team into a parallel universe of twisted logic, where the wrong set of jurors could exonerate those PPB goblins/abominations, eg, by buying into the pseudoscience-babble notion that excited delirium was Jim Chasse's principle cause of death.....

Just the thought sends me down the path of, could I get a job in Canada?. A well-worn mental path, first taken during that moment where OJ mouthed "thank you" to the jury forewoman after she pronounced him not guilty on all counts....

One of those formative, slow-motion moments that, in concert with many other moments, crafts a world view. First rite initiation, eg, into a strongly held opinion that we are a nation increasingly emperiled by our shoddy, entrenched school system.

Nonny, I am aware of how federal jury pools work in Oregon. I've been through the process. There were folks from the coast and from East of Mt. Hood and even south central WA state the day I went down there.

And I understand jury demographics and shopping for the right venue (if there is such a thing).

When I said far East of here I was referring to a federal district somewhere on the East Coast. That comment was more about judges who don't care about fairness and can get away with it than anything else.

WOW!
Way cool!