Ortega

Judges tend to stay on the bench. Appointed or elected, once they get on, they stay.

So it’s important to think carefully about the one judicial race on the May ballot. Incumbent Judge Darleen Ortega faces challenger Vance Day.

We recommend you vote for Ortega. She is a proven incumbent. Day, a former judge, was suspended for three years by the Oregon Supreme Court.

It can be more challenging to figure out who to vote for in a judicial race. Candidates can’t talk about specifics about how they might vote in certain cases. They can talk about their background. They can talk about their judicial approach. We interviewed them both, reviewed news articles and looked at a great resource, the Oregon State Bar’s voter guide. You can see that here, tinyurl.com/ORjudgeguide. Both Ortega and Day answered a series of questions about themselves.

Ortega grew up in Banks from the age of 10. Her mother is Mexican-American. She went to law school at the University of Michigan and returned to Oregon in 1992 to practice law. She was appointed to the Oregon Court of Appeals in 2003 and then won elections to stay. Ortega has a regular column in the Portland Observer reviewing movies and theater.

She is the only person of Latinx descent — the term she used — on the court. That matters not because the court must match the demographics of Oregon. It matters because it helps bring a body of life experiences to the court that would not otherwise be there.

Ortega told us uses her free time to try to better understand how people live and what they care about to better inform the decisions she makes on the court. Her judicial philosophy is simple: Apply the law to the facts of the case. The law is the law, she said. It is not about bending it to fit a political agenda.

When we interviewed Day, he asserted that Ortega aimed to use the law to create more equity in society. Ortega flatly rejected that sort of characterization. She does believe a challenge of her position is to be aware that the state’s most vulnerable citizens may face barriers in the legal system that may be invisible to judges. But she emphasized she does not try to manipulate the law to fit a result.

Do a quick search on Vance Day, who was a Marion County circuit court judge, and you will find he was suspended for three years by the Supreme Court of Oregon. The state’s judicial fitness commission had recommended he be removed outright from the bench.

There were several incidents involved. Day did not want to marry gay couples. He is a Christian, and it is counter to his beliefs. Day said he had briefly handed a convicted felon — a former Navy Seal who had been in his court — an unloaded gun. He had also put a picture of Adolf Hitler up in the county courthouse. He said it was part of a display about the defeat of fascism.

Day argues he is uniquely qualified for the court, in part, because he has been on the other side when the government came for him.

Who do you trust to be a judge on the Oregon Court of Appeals? For us, the choice is simple. Vote for Ortega.