Oregon’s parole board on Monday unanimously rejected the bid of a notorious convicted murderer who sought early release from state prison this month with backing from former Gov. Kate Brown and Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt.
Danielle Cox, 38, pleaded guilty in 2006 to aggravated murder in the 2003 torture and killing of Jessica Williams, a 22-year-old disabled woman, and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years.
Cox, who went by the street name Shadowcat from the X-Men comics, was 18 at the time — the daughter of middle-class parents who joined a violent street family that lured Williams, a young woman from Gladstone, to her death in Portland.
Nothing about the nature of Cox’s crime or the terms of her plea deal should have qualified her for Brown’s clemency, argue the victim’s sister and two former Multnomah County deputy district attorneys who prosecuted Cox. They said no one from Schmidt’s office contacted them to seek their opinions, even though Oregon law requires input from victims’ families.
“I don’t know what they were thinking,” said Chuck French, a retired Multnomah County prosecutor who brought the case to court. He contends that Schmidt’s office rubber-stamped her clemency application after a cursory vetting process and simply regurgitated her advocates’ comments in his recommendation to the governor. “This was a last-minute thing where they had to get everything done before the governor left office.”
The criticism comes as Schmidt and his progressive stances are under increasing scrutiny as he faces a re-election campaign in which he’s running against one of his own deputies. It also comes after an unsuccessful lawsuit filed last year by district attorneys in Lane and Linn counties and family members of four violent crime victims who challenged Brown’s broad use of clemency powers.
Flurry of commutations
Brown’s clemency order for Cox, signed Dec. 22 amid a flurry of such commutations and pardons in her final days in office, commuted her minimum sentence and allowed her to go before the Oregon Board of Parole five years earlier than she was previously eligible.
Raised in a middle-class family originally from Spokane, Cox graduated from Hillsboro’s Glencoe High School. She was a bright student and attended classes on scholarship at Pacific University for most of a year. But in the spring of 2003, she dropped out of college to join a “street family” whose members she’d met in Pioneer Courthouse Square.
Cox was one of 13 members of this gang when Williams, who according to court records was born with fetal alcohol syndrome and had the mental capacity of a 12-year-old, fell in with the group.
Over a period of six and half hours on the night of May 23, 2003, the group brutally beat Williams as punishment for reportedly lying to and being insubordinate to another member. Cox was one of three individuals who then took Williams to an area near the east end of the Steel Bridge and continued the beating, then stabbed Williams dozens of times and attempted to burn her body to destroy DNA evidence, according to court records.
Including time served prior to her 2006 conviction, Cox has completed more than 20 years of her sentence, most of them at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility.
Schmidt did not agree to an interview request. But in an emailed statement his office sent Tuesday, he said he based his decision to support clemency decisions on both objective and subjective criteria, including her record of behavior in prison and his belief that people can redeem themselves.
“[W]hen a person has demonstrated accountability and rehabilitation, we have to consider the point at which prison is no longer serving a punitive purpose, but rather a retributive one,” he said. “Based on these factors, I was willing to extend my support for Ms. Cox’s request for a second chance.”
‘Excellent progress’
Brown showed a particular zeal for clemency during her tenure. Before leaving office in January, she commuted 104 individual cases and granted 130 pardons, including 35 commutations and 68 pardons in her final 10 months. She also issued broader clemency orders, including for groups of juvenile defendants, people convicted of marijuana possession and those who helped the state’s firefighting efforts while in custody.
In a January letter to Senate President Rob Wagner, Brown explained her rationale for dozens of cases, including Cox’s.
Cox had made “excellent progress” and shown extraordinary evidence of rehabilitation, Brown wrote, noting that “her continued incarceration without an immediate opportunity to petition the Parole Board for release on parole does not serve the best interests of the State of Oregon.”
Brown made her decision based in part on information she’d received from Schmidt’s office, she said. Cox’s application also received support from her family members, teachers, corrections officers and Sen. Michael Dembrow, D-Portland, who met Cox as part of his work on prison education.
Schmidt had recommended Brown grant clemency to Cox two months earlier. In an October letter to Brown, Schmidt said Cox had used her time at Coffee Creek to better herself and those around her. He noted that she’d had no disciplinary infractions since 2012; had taken a variety of self-improvement classes; and played a critical role in expanding access to higher education at Coffee Creek.
“I want to recognize Ms. Cox’s commitment to change and the significant transformation she has achieved by offering my support for her clemency petition,” Schmidt wrote. “Commuting her sentence and allowing her to continue this work amongst our community would allow her to have an even broader impact.”
Lack of notice
Clemency can also alter the lives of victims and their families, so state statute requires that district attorneys notify them of any pending applications and provide the governor with their statements.
Schmidt told Brown that his office had left at least three voicemails for Williams’ parents over a period of nine months but had not received a response. But he did note that when Cox had applied unsuccessfully for commutation in 2017, Williams’ parents had strongly objected to any form of clemency.
Reached this week by phone, Amy Jones, Williams’ sister, said their mother died in 2018, but Willams’ father is still alive, her sister lives in their long-time home, and other members of her family are easily accessible. She said they heard nothing about the process taking place with Cox until one or two weeks before the parole board hearing.
“Whatever attempts they claim to have made, we were not notified,” she said.
Retired prosecutors who worked the case also were not consulted — or asked to help reach the victim’s family.
Liz Merah, Schmidt’s spokesperson, said deputies may consult with former colleagues on clemency petitions when feasible.
“This clemency application was one of about 350 that our office received from the Brown administration,” she said. “Due to the volume of applications and the extensive review each one required, it was not viable to contact the original prosecutors in every case.”
Norm Frink, one of the original prosecutors, said he reached Jones and Williams’ father easily after Brown commuted the 30-year minimum sentence of one of Cox’s co-defendants in the case, Carl Alsup.
“I was able to get hold of them in days,” said Frink, who retired in 2012. “If little old retired me can do that, why can’t the district attorney of Multnomah County, particularly when he has the statutory obligation to do so?”
Aliza Kaplan, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School and the director of its Criminal Justice Reform Clinic, said Multnomah County has the most thorough process for contacting victims’ families of any in the state. If anything, she said the unit that evaluates clemency applications should be more isolated from prosecutors, as their job isn’t to re-litigate past cases, but look at the circumstances today.
She said Williams’ father was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit against Brown last year that concerned, in part, the sentence of Cox’s codefendant, and that the family should have been aware of Brown’s actions generally. That legal challenge ultimately failed in August when the Oregon Court of Appeals upheld the governor’s broad clemency powers.
Brown’s action with Schmidt’s backing means Cox will now be able to reapply for early release every two years.
“When you hear what these people did to my sister, Cox being one of them, it’s mind blowing that they’re even considering this and that Schmidt’s office granted her the option,” Jones said. “What about some consideration for our family to not have to live through this again? It’s just not right.”
‘Not capable of rehabilitation’
After a June 7 hearing at Coffee Creek, the parole board found Cox had offered varying accounts about her role in Williams’ murder, lacked insight and honesty about it and “appeared to have much more extensive underlying criminality than she portrayed.”
“The Board unanimously finds that Petitioner is not capable of rehabilitation within a reasonable period of time,” its order read.
That means Cox is not eligible for early release, a process that would be the subject of another hearing, typically months later, after a psychological evaluation and development of a detailed parole plan.
Frink, who retired in 2012, noted that Cox would have faced a much longer sentence had her case gone to trial. But as part of the plea agreement negotiated to secure her testimony against co-defendants, she waived her state and federal constitutional rights, which Frink said includes commutation. Either way, the governor’s clemency powers overrule any plea agreement.
Kaplan, the law professor, said there are many cases that are “awful, heinous and troubling in every way,” but that doesn’t mean someone isn’t capable of rehabilitation.
“Without question Danielle is not a public safety risk,” she said. “She has had an incredible record in prison, she served others, and she’ll be back in front of the board.”
–Ted Sickinger; tsickinger@oregonian.com; 503-221-8505; @tedsickinger
