December 05, 2003
(Updated) Exclusion Zones And 'Preponderance Of Evidence'
Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.
Yesterday's Portland Mercury has a recap of sorts of the recent court ruling against the appeals process element to the City's so-called "drug-free" exclusion zones, which points out, "As of press time, city council was set to consider whether to raise the standard of proof necessary for an officer to issue an exclusion."
Indeed, as reported by yesterday's Oregonian, the City Council unanimously voted to adopt a "preponderance of evidence" standard for determining who to excluse from these zones.
The guts of the real troubles with such zones were explained by Commissioner Sten:
"I support this today because it's a toughening of the standards," said Commissioner Erik Sten, who has raised concerns about the old standard and in 1997 voted against expanding the drug-free zones into residential neighborhoods because of constitutional concerns. "I've never understood why we're so steadfast in making the police officer the judge."
The two emergency ordinances in question -- one for drug-free zones and the other to address similar elements of the anti-prostituion zones -- originally were to be voted on as part of the Council's consent agenda. But Mayor Katz pulled them into the regular part of the session to allow for the inevitable public comment. Indeed, Dan Handelman of Portland Copwatch said at the start of his comments that had Katz not pulled it from the consent agenda, he would have made such a request himself.
Although not beseiged by testimony, the emergency ordinances did spark a variety of conversations, including about how the court challenge in question asserted that the law establishing the exclusion zones was unconstituional "on its face" -- and as such were not designed to consider one specific instance of their use.
In the end, what the new ordinances do is change the original "probable cause" burden to one in which there must be a "preponderance of evidence" that one of the prohibited actions has been committed.
There is probably some sort of detail on all of this in my notes from the Council session, but I'm playing catch-up. Most of the relevant and needed information is available in the previously-linked Oregonian article.
Update
One interesting and very brief moment came in a dispute over whether or not such a higher standard was ever considered for the exclusion zones, and what various parties thought of such a standard.
"With all due respect, I have to object," said Commissioner Sten to Jim Hayden, a deputy district attorney for Multnomah County. "I asked for that standard, and you argued against it vociferously."
There was also some argument over whether or not the activites prohibited in these zones simply moves to surrounding neighborhoods, with representatives of local law enforcement saying there was no evidence to indicate this was the case, whle Handelman argued, in essence, that there was no reliable data to prove such displacement hadn't ocurred.