Jesse R. Benoit

Before I defended anyone, I was the one charging them. I read the police report first. I decided what the State would file. Then I stood up in front of a jury and tried to prove it.

I know how the file in your case was built, because building them used to be my job.

Most of it has been spent proving cases rather than defending them. I prosecuted in New Mexico from 2012 to 2018, picking juries, giving openings and closings, and putting DNA analysts and criminalistics experts on the stand. One case was a homicide tried more than twenty years after the killing, where every piece of forensic evidence was fought over from the first motion to the last.

Alongside it I have been a military lawyer since 2014, co-counsel in courts-martial and lead counsel for the government in discharge boards. Same discipline, different forum: a live witness, an exhibit to get admitted, and a panel to persuade. I am now Staff Judge Advocate for the Oregon Air National Guard.

What stays with you is not the verdicts. It is knowing how a file gets built. Which reports get written a particular way because something in them is thin. Which cases get charged hard because of a policy rather than because of the evidence. I read your discovery the way the other side reads theirs.

I will not tell you what you want to hear. If your case is weak, you will hear it from me early, before you have spent money chasing a theory with nowhere to go. If the offer on the table is the best outcome available, I will say so plainly, even when neither of us likes it. And if I think you should fight, I will tell you what fighting actually costs, in money and in time and in the months of not knowing.

Some of it is hard to sit through. It also means you will never be surprised by your own case.

I defend major felonies in Washington County Circuit Court and take my own clients here at Benoit Law Group LLC, in Hillsboro. You deal with me directly. The lawyer who reads your file is the lawyer who stands up in court.