SALEM — A convicted child sex abuser from Grant County who had time taken off his sentence due to a change in the law has died before being released from prison.

Robert D. Joiner, 71, died at a Salem hospital on Thursday, Oct. 17, the Oregon Department of Corrections announced in a news release. No cause of death was specified. 

Joiner had been incarcerated at the Oregon State Penitentiary with an earliest projected release date in 2027.

That was six years earlier than his previous projected release date of 2033. 

In 2006, a Grant County jury found Joiner guilty of nine charges related to the sexual abuse of two young girls over a period of years. He was sentenced to decades in prison for his crimes.

Some of Joiner’s convictions were reached by non-unanimous jury verdicts, which was legal at the time in Oregon. 

But in 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Oregon’s non-unanimous jury law was unconstitutional, along with a similar statute in Louisiana. Two years later, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that the high court’s decision could be applied retroactively, and Joiner appealed the non-unanimous verdicts in his case.

The Oregon Court of Appeals reversed the earlier verdict on one count and sent the case back to Grant County Circuit Court for resentencing on a lesser charge.

Senior Judge Christopher Brauer, following the appeals court’s guidance and terms of a settlement agreement reached between prosecutors and defense attorneys, carved several years off Joiner’s sentence at a hearing on May 17 of this year.

Long Creek resident Carmen Vaughan, the mother of the victims, and her now-grown daughters had been seeking a retrial since learning that Joiner might be released early. Vaughan said the family felt revictimized and were horrified by the possibility of Joiner getting out earlier than expected.

The victims, Cassandra Ross and Carrisa Forrest, both now in their late 30s, agreed to participate in a retrial. (While the Eagle does not generally publish the names of sexual assault victims, both women have expressed a desire to go public in this case.)

In victim’s statements read during the hearing, Forrest told Joiner what he took from her “wasn’t yours to take.”

“I have two beautiful children who will never have to go through what I went through because you’re locked up, and that’s the only thing that helps me sleep at night,” she said. “I hope death serves you well.”

Ross told Joiner he was rotten to his core.

“For five years I suffered your abuse directly,” she said. “For all the years afterward I have suffered indirectly. And never in all those years have you ever taken accountability, until now. What you failed and fail to realize even now is I want nothing to do with that form of inhumanity.”

Vaughan told Joiner, “If you ever, in your … life, come near any of my children or grandchildren, I promise you will regret it for the rest of your … short life.”

Joiner died 2½ years before his new projected release date in April 2027, having spent nearly 18 years behind bars.