Wiping Away the Truth

When should criminal records disappear?

Now that he has had his criminal record expunged, former Crips member Terrence Hayes, who once shot a man, has an important consideration to make: Should he exercise his legal right to own a firearm?

He’s thinking about it.

Hayes is the first person in Multnomah County to benefit from a new state law making it easier to have criminal convictions disappear – even if the offender, like Hayes, was guilty.

Under Senate Bill 819, District Attorney Mike Schmidt created a Justice Integrity Unit to review convictions and consider them for expungement, clemency or resentencing.

In Hayes’ case, his conviction was vacated. He had already served more than 12 years in prison and had been free since 2016. This wasn’t a situation of actual innocence. So why rewrite an honest criminal record?

The new state law allows it if a conviction “no longer advances the interests of justice.” By this reasoning, since the stigma of a felony lives on after the offender is free, it serves no purpose to continue punishing him.

By removing a felony as if it never happened, the former felon will have a better chance to find good employment, enter certain professions and obtain a home loan. Those are positive intentions, especially if the offender remains law-abiding.

By all accounts, Hayes has stayed out of trouble. In some respects, he is a prison success story. He doesn’t agree, but prison actually was good for him.

Hayes was sentenced under voter-approved Measure 11, which required mandatory minimum sentences for certain violent felonies. He went into prison a thug and came out a trained electrician.

Had his sentence been only a few years, would he have put his brain in neutral and bided his time? Would he have acquired the discipline and self-knowledge to change?

“If there’s evidence that Measure 11 makes people less likely to re-offend, I will eat some humble pie,” Hayes said.

In 2004 when he was 19, Hayes, accompanied by two other guys, shot Robert E. Ford, 22, in the parking lot of a convenience store in Northeast Portland. Everyone involved was affiliated with Portland gangs.

It would turn out that Hayes had shot Ford in retaliation for having been wounded himself two months earlier by a friend of Ford’s in the parking lot of a strip club in Northeast Portland. Prosecutors at the time said Hayes was uncooperative and adhered to a “code of silence.”

Eventually, a witness agreed to testify about the Ford shooting, and the Multnomah County Grand Jury indicted Hayes for attempted murder. He was tried and convicted on a 10-2 verdict. (This also would later help him when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against non-unanimous verdicts.)

Hayes went off to prison, which may have been a safer place for him.

In 2012, when he was still incarcerated for trying to kill Ford, the latter was shot to death in the parking lot of a strip club in Southeast Portland.

Meanwhile Hayes was settling down in prison. He learned a trade and obtained an electrician’s license. He was active in various prison programs, such as Toastmasters International that teaches public speaking.

By the time Hayes was released from prison, Measure 11 was under attack and had been weakened by the state legislature. District attorneys were pressured to plead down charges. House Bill 3194 passed in 2013 and removed third-degree robbery, first-degree sexual abuse and second-degree assault from Measure 11. Senate Bill 1008 passed in 2019 and removed violent juveniles – even those who kill – from Measure 11 and adult court.

Today a teenager can commit armed robbery, rape or kill, and he may enjoy the anonymity of juvenile court where his case will be adjudicated out of public view and public record. He may never be sentenced to a cell.

Hayes’ 17-year-old cousin, Quanice Hayes, never had a chance to see the inside of adult court or a jail cell. In 2017, he was shot dead by a police officer who responded to calls of a young man armed with a gun robbing and threatening people. After Quanice was killed, his firearm turned out to be a realistic-looking handgun that fired BB’s.

The Multnomah County Grand Jury declined to indict the officer, ruling the shooting was justified. Among the victims who testified was the man Quanice robbed of a food stamp card and jacket. The man had recently lost his job and was living in his car parked near a Value Inn Motel.

He testified how he woke up to someone knocking on his car window. He opened the window “and here comes the gun. … A .45-caliber gun coming at me. I know of guns because I’ve been in a military academy.”

Quanice told him, “You’re lucky you’re not dead right now because in Chicago we shoot you first, and then we rob you.”

The victim couldn’t know that it was mostly bluster. Quanice wanted the man to drive him around so he could rob people, but the victim had run out of gas and had no money.

According to the grand jury transcript, Quanice tore the car apart trying to find something else to steal. After a half hour, the teenager put the gun in his waistband and warned: “Don’t call the police. I see cop cars … driving around, I’m going to come back and put two in you.”

The victim waited 15 minutes, then ran to the motel for help. The officer who responded told the grand jury the man was visibly shaking. To the officer, that underscored the legitimacy of the call: The robber had a gun.

Quanice, meanwhile, broke into a woman’s parked car and trashed it. He pounded on the door of another woman’s home and demanded to be let in. She called police. He broke into the house of another woman who was not home. Her security alarm went off. Finally, he came face to face with police armed with real guns.

Following his death, his mother, grandmother and great grandmother made regular appearances at police protests and public hearings demanding “justice” for Quanice. Some news stories reduced the case to “unarmed black teenager killed by police.” Media coverage was largely sympathetic even when inconvenient truths were revealed, such as this piece by Leah Sottile on Longreads:

“The story of the last day of Quanice Hayes’s life is one that contains no heroes. It’s the story of two teenagers living on the streets, hustling up cash, making mistakes, partying with friends, and stealing when they thought they had to… .”

Quanice and his girlfriend spent his last night dancing and crashing in a motel room where there was cough syrup, booze, pills, pot and a bag of coke.

His girlfriend awoke to find him gone. A clerk at a Plaid Pantry convenience store would later tell police that Quanice came by shortly before 6 a.m. The clerk said he recognized him as someone who shoplifted candy and alcohol the previous night. Before Quanice could re-enter the store, the clerk ran him off.

It would also turn out that three months before he was shot, Quanice and another guy were making illegal entry into a woman’s car. Two Portland officers who arrested them found a realistic-looking handgun in their possession. The officers gave the teenagers stern warnings about the dangers of a fake gun – it could get them killed.

They arrested the teenagers and took them to a residential center run by Janus Youth Programs, which provides an alternative to juvenile detention – a place for second chances. Quanice ran off.

Three months later he was dead with a fake handgun by his side and cocaine, benzodiazepine and hydrocodone in his blood system.

None of this was mentioned when the Portland City Council agreed to pay Quanice’s family $1.5 million. When the settlement came before the council for approval, each city commissioner looked into the Zoom camera and issued a groveling apology.

This is all part of the giant rewrite of our criminal justice system, where a felony will no longer be a felony. But it has always been that some felons wipe away the stain of a felony on their own.

When Quanice’s cousin, Terrence Hayes, was a young gang member fighting an attempted murder charge, among his court-appointed attorneys was Kenneth Walker, a black man who once served time in prison for burglary. Later, Walker would become a Multnomah County Circuit Court judge.

These are different times.

At Quanice’s memorial service, Terrence Hayes employed the public speaking skills he acquired through the prison chapter of Toastmasters International. Hayes passionately described the frustration of watching white children playing with guns without fear of getting shot – while he couldn’t let his son play with a toy gun because the police might fear for their lives.

Hayes, now a free man with no felony record, is in a position to decide for himself whether to acquire a gun. He weighs both sides. One side is cautious; his wife would prefer that he didn’t own a gun.

“The other side gets excited to be armed,” he said. “I’m not perfectly sold, but I … lean towards it.”

One reason he leans towards it is that Portland is a different city than the one he roamed as a young man. There are record homicides, a district attorney who ran on a platform of prosecuting fewer crimes and a state legislature that has joined the national social justice movement to reduce prison sentencing.

Hayes now has a front-row seat on all of this. At City Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty’s suggestion, this month he was appointed to the city’s Focused Intervention Team Community Oversight Group.

The Focused Intervention Team replaced two previous gun and gang violence prevention teams, because they were found to disproportionately target blacks. The Community Oversight Group was created to make sure the new team doesn’t racially profile blacks.

But what if the people shooting and getting shot tend to be black?

Understandably, Hayes’ lived experience could be useful in traversing this world.

Except that his lived experience isn't what it used to be. He’s no longer a convicted felon.