Dec. 15, 2006

The Oregon Court of Appeals has now officially thrown out the multi-million dollar personal judgment against Bill Sizemore. Now, he owes the teachers union nothing and they owe him ,000 or so. That’s the good news. The bad news is the teachers unions will just turn around and continue suing Bill. The unions have made it clear that they will continue to sue Bill as long as he stays in politics and Bill has made it clear that he will not get out of politics, because of the union lawsuits. So, for the foreseeable future the courts will stay busy and the lawyers will make lots of money.

For the past two years, many of Bill’s friends have told him that eventually the courts would rule in his favor and he would be vindicated. Bill has consistently responded that when he wins in court, The Oregonian headline will not read “Sizemore Vindicated”, but something more like “Like O.J. Simpson, Sizemore Gets Off.”

Well, The Oregonian apparently is predictable when it come to Bill Sizemore, because this week the editors at The O fulfilled Sizemore’s “prophesy” almost to the letter. Their lead editorial, responding to Sizemore’s victory in the Oregon Court of Appeals, compared Sizemore’s legal victory to none other than O.J. Simpson, a man found civilly responsible for the death of his wife and a friend.

The Oregonian ignored the fact that Simpson was ordered to pay millions of dollars for the wrongful death of two people, while Sizemore was found by the court not to owe any money to the unions. Comparing Bill Sizemore to O.J. Simpson was low, even for the editorial board of The Oregonian.

It continues to intrigue us that The Oregonian still does not consider it newsworthy that the judge in the original lawsuit violated the judicial code of ethics by presiding over the OEA v OTU case for three years, concealing the entire time that his own son was a member and activist in the same union that was suing someone in his court. His son is now a union president.

Following is a letter Sizemore’s attorney sent to The Oregonian in response to their nasty editorial:

Mr. Robert J. Caldwell
The Oregonian
1320 SW Broadway
Portland, OR

Dear Mr. Caldwell:

I cannot let the many inaccuracies in your December 11 editorial ("Sizemore vs. the teachers unions") go unchallenged. There were basically two issues in the 2002 trial, forged signatures on initiative petitions and financial reports alleged to be inaccurate by a disgruntled ex-employee of Oregon Taxpayers United. The evidence was that fewer than 100 signatures were forged, out of hundreds of thousands submitted by OTU. There was not a shred of evidence that Bill Sizemore himself was personally involved in the forgeries, and the jury did not find that he was. Indeed, the undisputed evidence was that OTU followed a meticulous review process to ensure that signatures were valid.

As to the financial reports, one involved tax returns that had been prepared by a pre-eminent Portland accounting firm, an unlikely accomplice in a scheme to misrepresent one's finances. The issue there was whether the extent of OTU's "political" activities were accurately reported. The only evidence that they were not came from a former OTU employee who had quit after being denied a raise—and who herself had provided the information to the accountants. It is ironic that these returns were challenged by labor unions that regularly report zero political expenditures on their own tax returns.

Your statement that a jury found that "Sizemore's crew engaged in a 'calculated course of criminal conduct' and 'cynical, criminal manipulation of the democratic process" is incorrect. Those were statements of the judge who presided at the trial, not the jury, a judge who could scarcely conceal his contempt for Sizemore during the trial. He later removed himself from the case when his son's membership in the Oregon Education Association, one of the plaintiffs, became public. The Oregonian chose not to cover that story, however.

You report correctly that the appeals court let stand the forgery judgment but not the false reports judgment. What you omit is that this was a decision of 2 of the 3 judges on the appellate panel. The third would have thrown out all of the charges. OTU believes the dissenting judge is correct and will be requesting further review in the Supreme Court.

Finally, your comparison of Bill Sizemore to a murderer reveals an appalling lack of journalistic integrity. If Sizemore is guilty of anything it is in trusting employees who would betray him and in taking on the all-powerful public employee unions, the same unions the Oregonian just recently discovered had something to do with bloated PERS pensions, sick leave and disability abuses, and other "cynical manipulations" of the Oregon taxpayer.

Gregory W. Byrne
Attorney at Law
5550 SW Macadam Ave., Ste. 220
Portland, OR 97239