Nicholas Chappelle spent nearly a year at Snake River Correctional Institution after he was arrested and convicted for driving with a suspended license.
But he never should have spent a day behind bars.
Chappelle is one of untold numbers of Oregonians stopped by police, arrested, put in jail and even wrongfully convicted based on faulty DMV information — a breakdown in record-keeping that has existed for years but the state never fixed.
By the time a Columbia County prosecutor realized Chappelle was innocent, he had lost his job as a union ironworker and missed the birth of his son while held at the medium-security prison in eastern Oregon, far from his family in Scappoose.
Chappelle never questioned the charge, having relied on his defense lawyer, the prosecutor and state records. He even pleaded guilty to the felony.
His case highlights a major flaw in how the state Department of Transportation’s Driver & Motor Vehicle Services Division records license suspensions resulting from criminal convictions:
The DMV essentially marks suspensions as indefinite and keeps them on someone’s record forever. It has no system in place to consistently show when suspensions end.
The DMV has improperly recorded approximately 3,000 driver’s licenses in the last two decades as suspended indefinitely through either 12/31/9999 or 00/00/0000, according to data obtained by The Oregonian/OregonLive through a public records request.
The DMV enters the placeholder “end” date because the suspensions, by state law, don’t take effect until after someone has completed a prison or jail sentence. The agency has relied on each person convicted to send them a form once released from custody to start the clock running on their individual suspensions, but that rarely happens. Prison and jail officials haven’t been providing the forms to people released from custody, unaware who faced potential license suspensions.
As a result, the DMV records don’t get updated, which misleads police who rely on them when they do quick checks of driver’s licenses during traffic stops.
The DMV has no idea how many people have been charged and prosecuted because of the erroneous records, but DMV administrator Amy Joyce acknowledges the problem has gone unaddressed for years.
It appears DMV officials learned of the lapse at some point in the past, Joyce said. But it’s not clear exactly when and it “wasn’t at a high enough level to understand the urgency” to figure out a remedy, she told The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Prosecutors in the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Justice Integrity Unit zeroed in on the problem last summer and have tried to alert police agencies, sheriff’s offices and prosecutors across the state. State lawmakers also are considering fixes.
In Multnomah County alone, deputy district attorneys so far have identified more than 30 driving-while-suspended cases in which they have concerns about the “integrity” of a conviction or arrest based on bad DMV records, said Kelley Rhoades, a senior deputy district attorney in the unit.
It was the Multnomah County unit that flagged Chappelle’s wrongful conviction. So far, the unit has identified five other erroneous arrests and convictions.
Unwarranted traffic stops, arrests and prosecutions are “incredibly damaging to the legitimacy of the criminal justice system,” Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt said.
“When people figure out that people are wrongfully convicted it really shakes the trust that the community puts in us.”
Viktoria Lo, a civil rights and criminal defense attorney, said a conviction for driving with a suspended license can “trigger a lot of harsh consequences down the line,” including getting stopped, searched and arrested.
“Folks stand to lose their jobs, custody of their children and their whole reputation if they go to prison,” she said.
They often don’t know that the suspension is in error or that their license could be reinstated, she said.
“There are cases of people spending months in prison for a suspension that the police, district attorney and court did not realize was invalid,” Lo said.
“The whole system,” she said, “is relying on the DMV to get it right.”
‘ACTUALLY INNOCENT’
A St. Helens police officer stopped Chappelle on Jan. 30 last year for driving with expired registration tags near Skinny’s Gas Station on South Columbia River Highway.
The officer cited Chappelle for having no registration tags, as well as driving with a suspended license based on DMV records that she checked during the stop on the computer in her police car.
Chappelle waived his right to a grand jury hearing and pleaded guilty the next month.
Driving with a suspended license is a felony if the suspension was a sanction stemming from one or more prior convictions for driving while intoxicated or for a variety of crimes involving the operation of a motor vehicle, from assault to murder.
The relatively common motor vehicle crime of assault carries license suspensions of one to 10 years, depending on the seriousness of injuries. First and second convictions for DUII carry a one- to three-year license suspension, respectively.
Chappelle had been convicted in July 2016 of third-degree assault with a car and sentenced to probation. His license was ordered suspended for five years, to take effect Aug. 10, 2016.
By the time the officer pulled over Chappelle last year, his suspension had expired. But Chappelle didn’t realize it and no one else did either.
The DMV listed his suspension as lasting until 12/31/9999, according to its records. A prosecutor submitted an affidavit of probable cause to support the driving-while-suspended charge and a Columbia County judge ordered Chappelle held in custody.
On Feb. 4, 2022, a judge sentenced Chappelle to a year and a half in prison.
He was held at Snake River in Ontario for about 11 months until Multnomah County prosecutors alerted the Columbia County district attorney and St. Helens police that Chappelle’s prosecution relied on inaccurate DMV records.
Last month, Columbia County District Attorney Jeffrey Auxier moved to dismiss Chappelle’s wrongful conviction. “The defendant pleaded guilty to a crime for which he was actually innocent,” Auxier wrote.
Circuit Judge Michael T. Clarke agreed and noted that the DMV had “made some serious mistakes along the way.”
Chappelle first learned that he was serving prison time on a bogus charge as he appeared by video from Snake River for a court hearing on Jan. 13. It happened to be his 42nd birthday.
His court-appointed lawyer, Scott Baldwin, explained the mistake during the hearing.
“DMV was not updating the records and you actually were not felony suspended at the time that you thought that you were, and the state thought that you were and I thought that you were,” Baldwin told him.
When the judge asked if he had any questions, Chappelle responded: “No, thank you. Happy birthday to me.”
Chappelle now intends to sue the DMV, according to a notice filed by attorney Alex Meggitt. Chappelle also intends to sue the state Department of Corrections for keeping him in prison five days after the judge dismissed the case, Meggitt’s notice said.
“We consider this a problem of our creation,” Auxier said. “We should have caught this.”
POSSIBLE SOLUTIONS
The DMV’s failure to track the length of license suspensions essentially stems from inadequate sharing of critical information between courts, prisons and the DMV.
Defendants with license suspensions are supposed to present a DMV form – Notice of Release from Incarceration – to alert the state motor vehicle agency when they’ve completed a jail or prison sentence to signal the start of the suspension. It’s supposed to be signed by either a representative of the Oregon Department of Corrections, a county jail or the state parole board.
That rarely occurs, said Joyce and prosecutors, and no one has made sure the DMV was properly recording the start and end dates of the suspensions.
“I think we’ve learned it hadn’t worked,” Joyce said.
When Aaron Knott, the policy director for the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office, contacted the DMV last August, he worked with Joyce to create a work group to address the problem, including representatives from the Corrections Department and state associations representing sheriffs and district attorneys.
Under one proposal, the Corrections Department will alert the DMV every month or quarter about people recently released from prison who face a license suspension or revocation as part of their sentence.
“We’re still hashing out with DOC how this is going to work exactly,” Joyce said.
Jeremiah Stromberg, associate Corrections Department director, said the agency was unaware of the infinite suspension dates until contacted by the Multnomah County District Attorney’s Office.
He estimated about 300 people get released from state prison every month and it’s not always clear if they face driver’s license sanctions because those details sometimes aren’t included in sentencing orders, he said.
But the Corrections Department believes it can create a system to track down the information and share it with the DMV, he said.
“It shouldn’t take too long,” Stromberg said, but he didn’t have a timeline for the fix.
Another proposed legislative fix would have any license suspensions for people sentenced to jail start on the day of sentencing.
That would build accuracy into the system and wouldn’t reduce suspension periods by too much because jail terms typically are much shorter than prison terms, supporters said. The idea also acknowledges that each county’s sheriff’s office is hard-pressed to report jail releases to the DMV because of the sheer volume.
Knott helped draft the bill.
“In the absence of legislative action,” he wrote to lawmakers, “the risk of wrongful arrest and possible wrongful prosecution remains significant.’’
DA AUDITS
Meanwhile, several district attorney’s offices have started their own audits of their felony driving-while-suspended cases.
In Washington County, District Attorney Kevin Barton said his office’s Conviction Integrity Committee is almost done with an initial review of 155 cases going back five years and so far hasn’t identified any erroneous prosecutions.
His prosecutors, though, over the years have been trained to double-check suspension records by going back through court files to verify lengths of court-ordered suspensions before filing new charges, he said.
In Clackamas County, Chief Deputy District Attorney Chris Owen said his office also has recognized for years that the DMV’s license suspension information is frequently incorrect and so trains prosecutors to check underlying court records for valid suspension dates.
In Multnomah County, the 30 arrests and convictions deemed questionable and the six found in error were discovered in an audit that so far has looked at 750 of more than 2,000 felony license suspension cases under review, Rhoades said. That’s how the wrongful Columbia County conviction of Chappelle, who has had prior convictions in Multnomah County, was discovered.
Auxier, Columbia County’s district attorney, said once the Multnomah County unit alerted him to Chappelle’s mistaken conviction, he went into his office on a Saturday and reviewed all license suspension cases that resulted in a prison term. Then he assigned other prosecutors to examine additional cases that resulted in jail sentences going back to 2016 and others that were still pending.
So far, his office has caught one other case – right before the 26-year-old man involved, Casey Dewrell Austin of Scappoose, was set to be sentenced to a year and three months in prison for felony driving while suspended.
His story was similar to Chappelle’s: He pleaded guilty and didn’t realize his earlier five-year license suspension had expired when he was charged.
While prosecutors have more time to check records before pursuing a case, “officers in the field really are at the mercy of what’s on the DMV record” that pops up on their mobile computers, Auxier said. Police see a quick DMV summary that indicates if someone’s license is suspended, not the expiration date of a suspension.
If police are relying on the misleading DMV records, people are likely facing arrest, and at the very least, overnights in jail, he said. Sentences for a felony driving-while-suspended conviction can range from 10 months in jail to two and a half years in prison, prosecutors said.
DMV spokesperson Michelle D. Godfrey said the state agency is “working to be notified quickly of a person’s release from incarceration so our records accurately reflect the length of suspension.” That process is still being worked out with the corrections department.
“We at DMV strive to help everyone who wants one to obtain their driver license, ID card or other credential,” she said in an email. “These documents are an important part of our everyday lives. Our goal is always to have accurate records, so a customer can restore their suspended license as soon as authorized.”
‘AGAINST THE INTERESTS OF JUSTICE’
Jesse James West spent nearly five months in Portland’s Inverness Jail before he was released last week, another victim of the state’s sloppy record-keeping.
West, now 23, had been convicted of fourth-degree vehicular assault after a hit-and-run crash. He was sentenced to probation and his license suspended for a year, starting Aug. 30, 2018.
More than a year later on Sept. 10, 2019, he crashed his motorcycle and ran after a Portland officer had tried to stop him for speeding on Southeast Ankeny Street east of 97th Avenue, according to court records.
Police found him in a nearby apartment and arrested him on a felony count of driving with a suspended license based on inaccurate state DMV records that showed his license remained suspended. He also was charged with eluding police.
He pleaded guilty in 2020 and received another one-year license suspension and three years of probation. By November 2020, he violated his probation and was sentenced to a year and a month in prison.
Just this month, Multnomah County prosecutor Clayton Jacobson and West’s defense lawyer alerted a judge that West had been wrongly convicted of driving while suspended from the speeding case.
“The conviction goes against the interests of justice,” says the petition to reconsider the conviction.
West now awaits a hearing for the dismissal of his felony conviction.
Police snagged Terry Schaller of Portland as he was driving to get something to eat.
A Portland officer ran the plate on his car as he pulled into a Taco Bell parking lot on Nov. 2, 2015. DMV records showed the registered owner’s driver’s license was suspended.
Police waited for Schaller, who went into the fast-food restaurant, to return to the car and pull out of the lot before they stopped his car.
Schaller was charged with driving with a suspended license. He pleaded guilty in April 2016 and that month was sentenced to two years of probation and faced another one-year suspension of his license.
But his original one-year license suspension – from a 2013 fourth-degree vehicular assault conviction – appears to have expired by then.
Schaller, now 66, didn’t know better. He hadn’t kept track of his suspension dates.
“I just figured I had it coming, you know,” he said.
He ended up spending about a week and a half in jail on the erroneous conviction after he violated his probation.
Schaller, reached recently, said he wasn’t even aware of the apparent mistake.
“Now it kind of bothers me because I absolutely hated being in custody,” he said.
— Maxine Bernstein
Email mbernstein@oregonian.com; 503-221-8212
Follow on Twitter @maxoregonian
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