The lawyer for the victim of a child sex abuser who was released from prison nearly four years early on Friday called on the Oregon Department of Corrections to return the man to prison.
Attorney Jose Cienfuegos referred to the release of Joaquin Cowart, 47, as “unlawful” and accused the Corrections Department of misinterpreting an Oregon Supreme Court ruling over the summer that dealt with the sometimes arcane calculus of prison sentencing.
In a letter to Corrections Director Michael Reese, Cienfuegos asked the department to stop any additional early releases and return to custody people who have already been released under the agency’s revised calculations.
Cienfuegos’s client is a 29-year-old Jackson County woman who was a minor at the time Cowart abused her. The Oregonian/OregonLive typically does not identify sex crime victims.
He also sent letters to Attorney General Dan Rayfield and Gov. Tina Kotek, objecting to the way the Department of Corrections is applying the court ruling.
Corrections spokesperson Harvey Mathews said the agency “has no legal authority to return an offender to custody without a court order.” Mathews said the original judgment in Cowart’s case clearly showed the court applied time served to each count.
“If a court provides a corrected judgment to DOC, the sentence will be recalculated, a warrant will be issued by DOC, and the individual will be returned to custody,” he said in an email to The Oregonian/OregonLive.
Cienfuegos’s demand comes after revelations that the Oregon Department of Corrections recently reexamined the sentences of most of the state’s prisoners in light of the Supreme Court ruling. The agency in some cases shaved years off a prisoner’s time and released people outright without alerting prosecutors or crime victims.
The massive review led to earlier release dates for about 350 prisoners, including about 40 who were immediately released, corrections officials said.
The Supreme Court ruling stemmed from an argument by criminal defendant Abraham Torres-Lopez that the sentence computation unit of the Corrections Department should have credited him for the roughly four months he spent in two county jails on various criminal charges when it calculated his ultimate prison sentence on a Marion County conviction.
The court ruled that a trial court may give credit for concurrent jail time on separate allegations in another county. It also found defendants may get credit for time they spent in jail for violating the terms of their probation.
Prosecutors have argued that corrections officials are misinterpreting the ruling.
“Your decisions to unlawfully and unilaterally cut sentences for dangerous, violent criminals in your custody jeopardizes the safety of Oregonians, retraumatizes victims, and will result in unanticipated and significant ramifications across every community in the state,” Cienfuegos wrote.
Cowart was sentenced in 2021 for sexually abusing a child and possession of images depicting child sexual abuse. He was sentenced to four consecutive sentences, or 12 years in prison.
The Department of Corrections officials applied the more than 3 1⁄2 years of time he spent in jail before sentencing toward each count and moved up his official release date to June 3, 2021 — two days after he was sentenced.
“Absolutely no one would believe that a judge would sentence a repeat sex offender … to four consecutive 36-month sentences, only to apply credit for time served sufficient to reduce the period of incarceration to two days in prison,” Cienfuegos wrote. “Yet that is precisely what DOC found.”
He accused corrections officials of recalculating Cowart’s sentence and releasing him without consulting the judge who imposed the sentence or the prosecutor.
Cienfuegos also said corrections officials released Cowart without notifying the victim, who subsequently encountered him in the community.
“Although she does not believe he saw her, this was a searing and traumatic experience for her,” the lawyer said.
The Oregon Criminal Justice Truth Project, a nonprofit led by retired prosecutors, said Friday it had identified at least four high-profile cases where the Department of Corrections released prisoners early under the Supreme Court decision.
They include:
– Convicted rapist Mitchell Beckwith, 33, whose revised release date is March 2028; originally he was slated to get out of prison in late 2035. Beckwith was implicated in a spree of sex crimes targeting four women. He was prosecuted in Multnomah County.
– Brandon Gilpin, 32, who was convicted in Multnomah County of first-degree manslaughter for killing Torn Saephan and two counts of attempted murder for trying to silence eyewitnesses to the crime. Under the sentencing recalculation, his release date went from 2049 to early 2044.
– De’Anthony Simmons, 31, who was convicted in Multnomah County of second-degree manslaughter and first-degree burglary in the death of Ervaeua Ronchelle Herring, who was pregnant at the time of her death. His original release was set for August 2026; corrections officials cut his sentence by about three years. He appears to have been released; his name is not in the state database of people who are currently incarcerated.
– Xabian Riley, 37, was convicted in Multnomah County of first-degree manslaughter and unlawful use of a weapon in the 2012 killing of 29-year-old Kenneth Ray Henry, who was ambushed on his front porch and shot nine times. Riley’s release date went from May 2032 to May 2029 under the Department of Corrections analysis.
Kotek this week told Oregon district attorneys that the Department of Corrections reviewed each sentence to determine if it fell under the parameters of the Supreme Court ruling.
In a letter to the Oregon District Attorneys Association, Kotek said the Department of Corrections “needs to comply with the law and to follow the Court’s ruling.”
She said she expects the agency to “work collaboratively” with prosecutors and the courts to “ensure that the sentencing court’s original intent in sentencing in each case is effectuated in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling.”
She said the agency also has paused applying the court ruling to sentences to give prosecutors and courts time to enter judgments that spell out sentences for specific defendants.
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