Because I promised voters in 2020 that I would uphold the rule of law, treat every person in my courtroom with dignity, and keep our community safe. I have done that work for five years and I want to keep doing it.

Courts across the country are under real pressure right now. Judges who rule independently face public attacks designed to push them off the law. Experienced, independent judges on the bench are how we protect fair courts for everyone.

I have spent more than two decades in public service.

I started in the United States Air Force as a Judge Advocate General officer, serving nearly seven years on active duty in Alaska, Washington, and Germany. I tried more than 40 criminal cases — domestic violence, child abuse, drug offenses, sexual abuse of children, fraud, rape, and negligent homicide. I worked across the Pacific Northwest, through the European region, in Turkey and Afghanistan.

After the military, I spent thirteen years as an Assistant United States Attorney in Portland, focused on civil rights enforcement. I advocated for and created the civil rights program in our U.S. Attorney's Office. That work led the Justice Department to bring me in as National Civil Rights Coordinator, where I helped create more than thirty civil rights enforcement positions in U.S. Attorney's Offices across the country.

While I was in that role, I led the first federal class-action civil rights investigation of the Portland Police Bureau, which exposed a pattern of unconstitutional use of force against people with mental illness and resulted in changes to PPB's crisis response and use-of-force policies. Attorney General Loretta Lynch later presented me with the John Marshall Award — one of DOJ's highest honors for attorneys — for my work on behalf of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities facing employment discrimination.

I also served on the Oregon State Bar Board of Governors.

The full range of a circuit court docket: criminal, civil, and family. In more than five years on the bench I have presided over hundreds of cases. Felony crimes involving children. Civil employment discrimination. Contract disputes. Custody matters. Protective orders.

My rulings have been upheld on appeal, including in cases involving the prosecution of child sexual abuse and cases involving violent offenders. The appellate record shows what the headlines do not: the work holds up.

I do not think a judge's work ends at the courtroom door. A few of the things I have worked on while serving on the bench:

I helped launch a therapy dog program with Dove Lewis Canine Therapy Team to support child witnesses, victims of trauma, and others facing high-stress legal proceedings. The dogs now serve courtrooms across four counties.

I volunteer with SOAR (Sponsors Organized to Assist Refugees), meeting with refugee citizenship classes to introduce new Americans to the courts and the Constitution.

I have worked with bench, bar, and state leadership to address Oregon's public defender crisis. Access to counsel is a constitutional right, and the shortage is an emergency.

I co-founded the Oregon Attorneys with Disabilities Association to support lawyers with disabilities and advocate for accessibility in the profession.

I have facilitated training for Oregon judges on how to effectively work with court interpreters, so litigants who do not speak English fluently get the same quality of due process as anyone else.

I have presented at the federal level on expert witness law.

None of this is on the ballot. All of it is part of the job as I understand it.

Courage on the bench. Compassion in the courtroom.

Courage means applying the law to the case in front of me, not the case someone wishes were in front of me. It means holding the government to the standard the Constitution requires, even when that is unpopular. It means making rulings I can defend on the record.

Compassion means remembering that every person who walks into my courtroom is having one of the harder days of their life. Even when the law requires a hard outcome, the process should leave people feeling like they were heard.

I decide on the facts and the law, not on what is politically convenient for any elected official, myself included.

When courts bend to political pressure, the people who pay the price are not the politicians. It is the person without a lawyer. The family without connections. The community that is already hard to hear. Judicial independence is how we make sure the law applies the same way to all of us, and right now it is under more strain than I have seen in my lifetime.

No. Never.

The people who have watched this work up close.

Former Governor Barbara Roberts. Presiding Judge Judith Matarazzo of Multnomah County. Chief Criminal Judge Michael Greenlick. Former Chief Criminal Judge Cheryl Albrecht. Mental Health Court Judge Nan Waller. START Court Judge Melvin Oden-Orr. Judge Ben Souede. Disability Rights Oregon. Civil rights leaders. Immigrant community leaders. The President of the Islamic Society of Greater Portland. A former Assistant U.S. Attorney. The CEO of Hacienda CDC.

These leaders do not endorse lightly. They are endorsing a record they have watched me build.

I slow down. I explain. I make sure they understand what is happening, what their options are, and what comes next. Everybody in the room has to understand the process for it to be fair. When a courtroom runs in shorthand that only the lawyers follow, the system is not working the way it was designed to.

With clear eyes and compassion, using every tool the law gives us.

Multnomah County has specialty courts for a reason. Drug court. Mental health court. START Court. Judges who sit with these cases every day know that one-size responses do not work. When the law allows a path that combines accountability with treatment, I take it.

I had a recent case involving a defendant with bipolar disorder who had simply been off his medication. The case did not call for a harsh outcome. It called for the right tools, and I used them.

Language access. Disability access. Physical access to the courthouse. Plain-language explanations. The ability to request an accommodation without feeling like you are asking for a favor. These are what justice requires, not nice-to-haves we hand out when we feel generous.

I live with an invisible disability, and my child has learning disabilities. I know from the inside what it feels like when a public system has no room for you, and I know what it means when someone builds a little more room. I try to be the person building that room in my courtroom.