A Clackamas County judge this week decided to give a hands-on civics lesson to a class of visiting second graders, inviting eight of them to serve as jurors in a hit-and-run trial, swearing them in, allowing them to sit in the jury box and giving them supplies to take notes.
At one point she wondered aloud if they were old enough to know how to write.
Circuit Judge Ulanda Watkins even suggested to the defendant that she would reach a verdict “with the assistance of my special jury.”
Watkins’ decision to enlist elementary school students in the misdemeanor trial appeared to take everyone involved by surprise.
The chief deputy district attorney scrambled to track down the presiding judge when he learned of the extraordinary arrangement. The alleged victim said later that she found the judge’s approach “very unusual.”
Watkins said in an interview Friday that she takes her job seriously and tries to ensure “everyone is heard.”
“I would never ever make light of a trial,” she said.
In the end, Watkins delivered an acquittal without consulting the students — the 7- and 8-year-olds left before the trial concluded. But the judge’s off-the-cuff overture to the school children became the talk of the courthouse in downtown Oregon City.
It began when Watkins took up the case of State v. Varvara, a bench trial over an alleged collision last year on an Interstate 205 off-ramp. A judge, not a jury, reaches a verdict in a bench trial.
The seats of the gallery were filled with second graders from Oregon City when Watkins took the bench.
“I am going to ask if you guys would help me as a judge,” Watkins told them, according to an audio recording of the trial. “I’m going to need some special jurors.”
She went on to tell them to “put on their special listening ears because it’s going to be, like, really, really, really important that you hear everything that is said and you have to pay very close attention because you’re going to sit up here and you can’t talk but you have to watch everything.”
She said eight of them could serve as jurors. She asked her court staff to bring them pads and pens typically given to jurors to track evidence in trials.
“Can you guys take notes?” she asked. “Do you write yet in second grade?”
She went on to describe the duties of a juror.
“These two people need us to pay very, very close attention to everything that’s said because we decide what happened” on the day of the collision, she told the kids.
“I am so happy to have your help,” she said.
Watkins spent about five minutes addressing the students. She had a member of her court staff read the jurors’ oath to the students, asking them to promise to “well and truly try the matter at issue between the state and the defendant according to the law and evidence as given at trial.”
“You have to say I do,” she told the kids.
“I do,” they said.
“So that means you guys are official and you’re going to listen and you’re going to write and if at any time you can’t hear when we start to listen to witnesses you’re going to let us know immediately,” she said.
Then she turned to the defendant, Samuel Varvara, 56, to explain the hearing. He had been accused of damaging the side view mirror of a woman’s car before leaving without exchanging insurance information.
“I am going to be the person — with the assistance of my special jury — to determine whether or not the state has met their burden because it is the state’s burden to prove beyond a reasonable doubt the facts,” she told Varvara.
Before the state presented its case, Watkins directed the prosecutor to “make sure you walk around the courtroom so that all of the members of the jury can hear you.”
The case was prosecuted by Christa Doerbeck, a certified law student from Lewis & Clark Law School who tried the case under the guidance of more experienced prosecutors from the DA’s office.
As Doerbeck started her opening statement, she addressed the children as “members of the jury.”
At one point Watkins asked that the state’s evidence — photos of the alleged collision — be handed to the students.
“Oh yes, yes, the jury,” Doerbeck responded.
“You can look at them and pass them around,” the judge told the kids, “because they’re in evidence.”
On the recording, Watkins did not appear to consult either side about the children’s participation in the trial.
Varvara represented himself. He faced a charge of failing to perform the duties of a driver in an accident that involved property damage. Reached by phone, he said he didn’t have a problem with the children’s role in his case.
“If I had a concern, I would have said that right there in the court,” he said.
Phil Lemman, deputy state court administrator for the Oregon Judicial Department, said Watkins did not “specifically ask” Varvara or Doerbeck if they objected “but visually looked for any signs of concern or objection, and there were none.”
He called the experience a “well-intentioned effort to give interested, well-behaved students a meaningful experience during their court visit.”
As the trial was underway, a senior prosecutor in the Clackamas County District Attorney’s Office was made aware of the children’s role.
Records show Chief Deputy District Attorney Chris Owen emailed the two more experienced prosecutors in the courtroom that he was trying to contact the presiding judge, Michael Wetzel. He told them he informed another judge, Heather Karabeika, “of the unusual procedure taking place.”
Owen directed the prosecutors to raise their concerns during the trial; twice, they asked Watkins if they could address the court. The judge, according to the audio recording, assumed the lawyers planned to rehash settled issues and denied their requests.
In another email sent later that day, Owen told his staff he had spoken to the presiding judge “about our significant concerns over what took place today.”
It is unclear what happened as a result of that conversation; while Wetzel leads the Clackamas County bench, each judge is elected. They serve six-year terms.
Watkins was appointed to the bench in 2017 by former Gov. Kate Brown. She is up for reelection in the May 21 primary. She is unopposed.
Before the two-hour trial ended, the students quietly filed out of Watkins’ courtroom.
The judge’s decision to engage at length with the children and treat them as jurors represented a “dignity and decorum issue,” said Steven Lubet, a professor emeritus at Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law.
“Even pretending they will have a role in deciding the case is wrong,” said Lubet, an authority on judicial ethics. At The Oregonian/OregonLive’s request, Lubet listened to the recording of Watkins’ interaction with the students.
“It’s fine to greet the children and explain what’s going to happen,” he said. “That’s part of civic education, but creating a mock jury of 7-year-olds with no indication that they are going to do anything other than help the judge is a failure of dignity.”
Tanya L. Baker, 55, of Oregon City, who had accused Varvara of hitting her car, said she has put the matter behind her.
Still, she found the involvement of children in the case odd. It was her first time in court, she said.
“I don’t feel like the judge conducted herself in a very professional way,” Baker said.
“No one knew what was going on,” she said. “The judge just kind of made this a fun experiment for the kids, I think. So no one was consulted. … They have every right to observe, but the fact that she put them on a mock jury — it was very strange, honestly.”
As a preschool teacher in Happy Valley, she said she understood Watkins’ desire to make court a learning experience.
“But,” she said, “I felt like that wasn’t the time or place.”
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