A Portland Police Bureau squad car parked outside the Coordinated Care Pathway Center in Portland on Dec. 3, 2024. The bureau was key to investigating a car theft incident which has made it to the Oregon Court of Appeals. (Photo by Ben Botkin/Oregon Capital Chronicle)
The Oregon Court of Appeals has allowed local prosecutors to rely on surveillance video from Portland’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility to charge a Tillamook woman who allegedly helped steal a car and gas from a nearby used-car dealership.
A Multnomah County grand jury in July 2022 indicted Staci Lynne Parr Turner, 50, on four charges involving the unauthorized use of a vehicle, criminal mischief in the first degree, unlawful entry into a vehicle and theft in the first degree. In June 2022, an employee with Uniquely European Auto Sales reported finding several damaged vehicles, stolen gasoline from tanks and a missing 2011 Ford Club Wagon, court records show.
Portland Police were unable to rely on security cameras at the auto sale shop because two suspected thieves had allegedly used ladders to reach the roof and disconnect the cameras. But the bureau was able to work with a federal officer to access surveillance video from the nearby South Portland waterfront ICE facility, records show. The film displayed a red Nissan Rouge parked by the auto shop’s south lot.
With the footage and a previous mugshot of Parr, investigators were able to identify her as a driving suspect who fled from the scene after another thief exited the auto lot and poured a bag’s contents into the tank of Parr’s car. The footage also allegedly showed the car ramming a fence at one of the lot’s gates in the early morning, breaking the barrier and allowing the stolen Ford vehicle to exit.
But Parr’s case hit a major snag before going to trial, when a judge in March 2024 ruled that prosecutors lacked enough evidence to proceed with their first charge regarding the unauthorized use of a vehicle. Two months prior in January, Judge Leslie Bottomly also found that the state’s attorneys “failed to lay a foundation for admission of the video evidence offered.”
Last week, however, a three-judge panel of the Oregon Court of Appeals rejected that argument, finding that prosecutors had met a burden established in a 2019 legal precedent determining how to evaluate whether such evidence is authentic. That requires assessing whether the recording device was capable of receiving testimony, the competency of the recording device operator, the accuracy of the recording, how well it was preserved and whether its speakers can be identified.
“Although it is true that the exported files represented only specified timeframes and camera angles, there is no evidence that the files themselves were altered,” wrote Oregon Court of Appeals Judge Scott A. Shorr in the decision. “Accordingly, although arguments could be made to challenge the veracity of what is depicted in the exhibit, there is sufficient evidence for a fact-finder to determine whether to credit the video.”
The judges sent the case back to Multnomah County Circuit Court for further proceedings and a jury to consider the evidence. They rejected arguments from Parr’s attorney, Carla Edmondson, who contended that prosecutors failed to offer a witness who had observed the recorded events themselves and that the identity of the ICE operator who exported the clips for Portland police was unknown.
“Those arguments do not so seriously discredit the authenticity of the recordings such that no factfinder could have confidence in them,” Shorr’s opinion reads.
He added: “Our conclusion that it meets the standard for admission…should not be read as a comment on any of the arguments as to whether the video was sufficiently persuasive to establish, as fact, that defendant was involved in the thefts.”
Edmondson did not immediately respond to a Tuesday request for comment. Jenny Hansson, a spokesperson for the Oregon Department of Justice, which argued the case on appeal, distanced the state’s efforts from ICE’s broader operations.
“The Oregon Court of Appeals ruled that surveillance video that police obtained from the ICE facility, which depicted the alleged criminal events occurring across the street, could be properly authenticated and could be submitted to the jury at Turner’s criminal trial,” she wrote in a statement. “The incident itself happened in 2022 and had nothing to do with immigration enforcement.”
Pat Dooris, a spokesperson for the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, did not immediately have any comment.
The Portland ICE facility is a processing center established in 2011 where detainees are supposed to be held for up to 12 hours until they are released or transferred for longer detentions to other ICE centers, such as a facility in Tacoma, Washington.
The Portland facility has been at the center of protests since last year over President Donald Trump’s increasingly aggressive deportation policy. Oregon is one of a few states in the nation that does not have any long-term, large-scale immigration detention facilities.
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