Oregon’s judge says they told him to buy weapons, he lost 35 pounds because the law could not protect him from the “terrifying” emails

One of the most rank judges in Oregon asked a state senators committee this week to prepare a law to protect the judges of the people who deepen their personal lives to try to intimidate them, after he said that the current law He could not protect him from a discontent man. who sent him emails that deeply undermined his sense of security.

The judge of the Court of Appeals of Oregon, Ramón Pagán, said he presided over a trial that involved the man in 2021, while Pagán worked as a family law judge at the Washington County Circuit Court. In 2023, Pagán learned that the man had repeatedly declared that he knew where Pagán lived, and the man soon began to send an email to the maps of Pagán marked with “small tips” that showed where the man thought that he saw Pagán or his wife walking with his dogs.

Pagán said that the man also sent an email to him and the colleagues “a very complex mental map of which I was the center” and unearthed a copy of a newspaper that his wife wrote in the 1990s, when he was 15 years old and lived in New York.

“Which means that he had come so far in the dark network that he had somehow obtained that information and that he was so obsessed with us that he would do something like that,” Pagán said. “But it didn’t threaten me.”

Pagán told the Senate Judicial Committee on Tuesday that because the man was “intelligent” sufficiently to know where the legal line was drawn, the police was helpless to intervene.

“I personally lost 35 pounds during that time,” Pagán said. “I couldn’t walk my dogs anymore. I had to change all my routines at home. They told me to buy firearms. “

The existing law, particularly the definition of the crime of threat, could not protect Pagán, said, because the law requires an “imminent” threat of “serious physical injuries”, but the discontent man had never explicitly made such a threat.

“These communications, these acts, were not designed to fear imminent danger,” Pagán said. “They were designed to put me fear of an unknown danger, at the same time unknown. And for me to believe that I am never safe and that my wife or family are as long as it is a judge who has negatively affected this man’s life. ”

Pagán said it was only after those disturbing that the police could intervene because the man threatened to inform a conspiracy that he had invented on Pagán if Pagán did not reversed his last ruling in the case of the man, the judge said. That, Pagán said, was attempted to extort himself.

But Pagán said he should never have reached that point,

The judge asked legislators to prepare a bill, or review an existing one, Senate Bill 473 – Outlaw trying to force a judge to issue a favorable decision or reverse a past decision through emails or other communications that do not equal direct and immediate threats.

The Senate Law 473, that Senator Floyd Prozanski, D-Eugene, presented last month, just seeks to make it a minor crime threatening imminent and serious physical damage against a judge or public official, as a prosecutor or employee of the city, due to your work. It would also be a crime to threaten their family members. After a second conviction, the act would become a serious crime, possibly prisoner.

Prozanski, however, said he was interested in talking with a future work group about the possibility of structuring a new law within the limits of the Constitution while approaching Pagán’s concerns.

“For me, what is at stake here is actually the credibility of our institutions,” Pagán said. “Our agreement with the public, as a court, is that their disputes will be resolved in court and only in the Palace of Justice.”

– The Oregon/Oregonlive