Gillmore victim laments roster of parole reform group

Rapist’s attorney part of committee formed to overhaul parole hearings

By Mara Stine

The Gresham Outlook, Aug 12, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (6 Reader comments)

A rape victim whose attacker could be paroled by summer’s end finds fault with a new committee charged with overhauling the state’s parole hearings.

Tiffany Edens, 34, who is fighting Oregon’s parole board to keep serial rapist Richard Troy Gillmore behind bars, said the public defender representing Gillmore should not be on the 13-member work group, which held its first meeting in Salem on Friday, Aug. 8.

Steven Powers, parole board chairman and a nonvoting member of the work group, said Deputy Chief Defender Bronson James, Gillmore’s attorney, is a highly qualified and knowledgeable professional selected by the Office of Public Defense Services’ chief defender to serve on the group.

Even so, the selection strikes Edens as a conflict of interest.

“He’s Gillmore’s attorney … in a pending case,” she said. “I think that’s a little weird, a little awkward. Shouldn’t they have picked someone else?”

The parole board last year decided twice to release Gillmore, the infamous Jogger Rapist who terrorized teenage girls and young women in East Multnomah County during the late 1970s and early 1980s. He’s served 21 years of a 30-year minimum sentence for raping then-13-year-old Edens in 1986.

Although he confessed to raping eight other women, the state’s statute of limitations for prosecuting those rapes had passed. Gillmore’s rape of Edens accounted for his only conviction.

This January, after Edens sued the parole board, a judge blocked Gillmore’s release by ordering a third parole consideration hearing, which took place in June. The board hasn’t announced its decision. The following month, Powers formed a committee to review the board’s procedures.

Edens’ battle has gained national publicity. Outraged that the three-member parole board approved releasing a man who psychiatrists say remains a danger and is likely to re-offend, citizens sent letters and e-mails to the board, encouraging it to keep Gillmore in prison.

Troubling trend

Controversial parole requests involving inmates such as Gillmore are becoming more common as convicts who committed crimes decades ago are becoming eligible for parole.

The parole board has authority to release three kinds of inmates: those whose crimes date back to before Nov. 1, 1989, those sentenced as dangerous offenders and those convicted of murder who also are eligible for parole.

But back in the 1980s, the board also had authority to change an inmate’s prison term, which is what happened in the Gillmore case. Instead of the judge’s ordered 30-year minimum, the board changed it to 15 years, making Gillmore eligible for parole sooner than his victims ever expected.

The board no longer has this authority, but the present board is stuck deciding whether to parole inmates whose sentences were reduced under old rules.

Approximately 1,600 inmates — the most dangerous of the state’s 13,500 inmates — are under the board’s release authority. And many of their sentences are winding down.

Recently, the board granted parole to Raymond Roy, a double murderer who savagely killed his brother and sister-in-law in 1984. He walked out of prison in May after serving 24 years of a life sentence with a mandatory minimum of 20 years.

Powers said he recognized the need for a review of the parole board’s hearing process when he was appointed to the board in February 2007.

The Gillmore case — and Edens’ treatment during his parole consideration hearings — has only heightened the need for reform, said her attorney Jim McIntyre.

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