The vacations and dismissals occurred in 2023.

According to the Oregonian newspaper, the problems stemmed from Oregon’s Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) using a placeholder date for suspended licenses, either 12/31/9999 or 00/00/0000. The placeholder was needed because under Oregon law, license suspensions don’t take effect until a person completes a prison or jail sentence.

Under the state’s system, defendants were required to contact the DMV and submit a form signed by a jail or prison official to activate the suspension and set its expiration date. That frequently didn’t happen. In some instances, defendants forgot to follow through. In other instances, they never received the proper forms. During checks after traffic stops, the motorist’s license would come back as suspended, potentially leading to new charges and further hardship.

Nicholas Chappelle, for example, was stopped for having expired tags on January 31, 2022. The officer in Columbia County who pulled him over ran a license check through the DMV, which showed Chappelle’s license was suspended based on a 2016 conviction in neighboring Multnomah County for third-degree assault with a car. The suspension was supposed to expire in 2021, but it was never removed from the DMV database.

Chappelle pleaded guilty to the suspended license charge on February 4, 2022, and received a sentence of 18 months in prison. After court officials learned that the suspension had expired prior to the arrest, Chappelle’s conviction was vacated and dismissed on January 13, 2023.

According to the Oregonian, district attorneys knew of the problems with the DMV’s system and had begun working with the agency in the summer of 2022 to develop a remedy, but there was insufficient urgency to move quickly. The Oregonian’s initial story ran in February 2023, creating pressure on prosecutors to move more quickly and correct these wrongful convictions.

In Clackamas County, prosecutors moved to dismiss 18 felony convictions for driving with a suspended license. They expected between 20-30 dismissals for misdemeanor convictions on the same offense. Chris Owen, a deputy district attorney in Clackamas County, said the review period in his county covered convictions between 2010 and April 1, 2023. He and other prosecutors checked hundreds of convictions, and then mailed letters to defendants telling them of the district attorney’s intention to dismiss their cases.

Andrew Freeman, a senior deputy district attorney in Washington County, said that after learning of the problem, the DA’s office did an initial screening of potential cases to determine an error rate. It then went back a decade to look at the entire population of affected cases. After the review, it notified defendants, with a priority for those who were on probation. Freeman said the county dismissed 17 felony convictions and 30 misdemeanor convictions.

In Multnomah County, prosecutors working in the conviction integrity unit (CIU) vacated the convictions of at least six defendants based on the DMV’s record-keeping issues.

The earliest wrongful conviction in that county, for a woman named Shala Mosley, occurred in 2004. The Oregonian said that the DMV was working with the state Department of Corrections to develop a system for the DMV to get accurate release dates for prisoners to log when a license suspension is supposed to begin and end.

Along with Mosley and Chappelle, Adam Rust, Derec Keefer, and Lucio Carillo are also listed as individual exonerations in our main Registry. The names of all the defendants isn't public. For other known defendants, listed below, there is incomplete information about their cases.

– Ken Otterbourg

Known Defendants in this Group

Lucio Carillo, Austin Casey, Nicholas Chappelle, Vicie Ferguson, Shala Mosley, Adam Rust, Terry Schaller, Paul Sutherland, Jesse West, and Derec Keefer.