Gov. Kate Brown has selected two lawyers in private practice to be the new Lincoln County district attorney and to fill a vacant circuit court judgeship.
In doing so, Brown went outside the district attorney’s office to fill that position and to also pass over a Lincoln County temporary hearings referee to fill the judicial vacancy.
Jonathan Cable of Waldport, who has been in private practice in Newport for four years, was named district attorney on Friday. He succeeds Michelle Branam, who resigned last fall after five years in the position to work for the Oregon Department of Human Resources in Newport. His appointment takes place immediately.
The governor also appointed Newport attorney Marcia L. Buckley to position 2 on the Lincoln County Circuit Court, filling a vacancy created by the retirement of Paulette Sanders last year. Buckley, who is in private practice, has worked in the district attorney’s office, is president of the Lincoln County Bar Association and a member of the state bar’s disciplinary board.
Brown’s appointments Friday, Jan. 17 also involved a selection to the Oregon Court of Appeals and a judgeship in Linn County. All were attorneys in private practice.
“I am proud to elevate this group of talented attorneys to posts in courthouses around our state,” Brown said in a news release. “These individuals bring experience from all corners of the legal profession: some have been prosecutors, others defense attorneys.”
The DA’s office
Cable, a 2001 graduate of the University of Toledo School of Law, worked in the district attorney’s office from 2006 to 2015.
In selecting Cable, who spent nine years in the district attorneys office but now works mostly as a public defender, the governor passed over three deputy district attorneys who had applied for the opening — Kenneth Park, R. Lynn Howard and Christine Herrman.
Cable is a board member of the Lincoln County Defenders and serves on the Oregon State Bar’s uniform criminal jury instruction committee. In 2011, Cable received the Lincoln County law enforcement recognition award.
The position is up for election in the May primary. So far Park, a former Oklahoma policeman and currently a deputy district attorney, is the only person filing to challenge the newly-appointed district attorney.
Christian Stringer, an attorney with the Oregon Department of Justice, had served as interim district attorney since Branam’s resignation.
The Lincoln County district attorney has a yearly budget of nearly $3 million and supervises a staff of 33 including nine other attorneys. The state sets the DA’s salary at $106,000 a year; Lincoln County currently adds another $17,000.
Cable told the Newport News-Times that he plans to appoint Brian Gardner, a former deputy district attorney now in private practice, to become his chief deputy. That position has been vacant.
Cable also said one of the challenges in the office is the amount of turnover in the office. That’s due, he told the News-Times, of attorneys using the job to gain experience and move on elsewhere, which in turns leaves remaining attorneys overloaded with work.
“People want to live on the I-5 corridor,” Cable told the News-Times. “Part of it, too, is the more turnover you have, the more you end up having, because the people that are there just get inundated (with the work overload) and have another opportunity.”
The judicial appointment
Buckley got her undergraduate and law degrees from Lewis & Clark College in Portland.
Park, Amanda Benjamin, who is an appointed hearings referee/pro-tem judge, and Russell Baldwin, who ran unsuccessfully for a judgeship in 2018, had also applied for the appointment. Benjamin will continue in her hearings referee position.
Buckley and Benjamin filed in September to run for the position in the May primary election.
Buckley told the News-Times that she was excited to meld her experience in criminal and civil law to “do some good work for the community.”
“I get to make sure everybody has access to justice, which is really important to me,” Buckley told the newspaper. “I want to be the person where they come to court and they get to feel like they’ve really been heard. That’s what I want more than anything.”
