This story was originally published on YachatsNews.com and is used with permission.
Jenna Wallace hadn’t anticipated seeking election to become a district attorney. Not yet, anyway.
Wallace has been a prosecutor in the Lincoln County district attorney’s office since 2022 after stints in Coos and Lane counties and became chief deputy for district attorney Lanee Danforth in mid-2023.
Danforth filed for re-election last September on the first day to file for a primary election that was still eight months away. Then suddenly – and without public explanation – Danforth withdrew in late March.
Wallace jumped in.
“I had envisioned her running and winning,” Wallace said in an interview with YachatsNews, adding that she was enjoying her new responsibilities as chief deputy and thought at some point in the “distant future” she would consider seeking the district attorney’s office.
When Danforth pulled out, Wallace said she thought “Ok, this is it. This is the time. The opportunity presented itself. It was the door that opened and I’m going to walk through it.”
The filing deadline was March 12. Wallace filed March 7.
And then on March 11 she got an opponent – longtime Newport defense attorney Kathryn “KB” Benfield, who told YachatsNews she had been contemplating seeking the office since last summer. “Nothing convinced me to run at the last minute,” she said. “I was trying to learn more.”
So this month voters will have a choice of who replaces Danforth, the one-term district attorney whose term has been marked by office turmoil and turnover, public clashes with county commissioners, and a federal lawsuit by a former deputy district attorney.
Both Wallace and Benfield say they are ready to bring calm and order to the office, rebuild the ranks of prosecutors, and work more cooperatively with county commissioners who control the office’s budget.
Because it is a one-on-one race, the winner of the May primary will become district attorney in January 2025.
The candidates
Wallace, 34, was born and raised in the San Diego area but wanted to get out of southern California for college, was offered a softball scholarship at Northwest Christian College (now Bushnell University) in Eugene and took it. She was also the school’s student body president her junior and senior years.
After graduating she went to the University of Oregon’s law school, interned with the Washington County district attorney’s office for two summers and then started part-time as a prosecutor in Coos County the last semester of her senior year.
“It was good experience,” she said of jumping right into the job. “I did felonies my first week.”
Seeking a larger office, Wallace moved to the Lane County district attorney’s office in 2018. It was in Lane County, she said, where she received her best mentoring and training, vowing to someday pass that along to others.
She came to Lincoln County in 2022, wanting to return to the Oregon coast with her family. Her husband is Orrin Wallace, a former member of the Coquille Police Department who Danforth hired last August to be one of two DA investigators. Wallace had resigned in 2020 from the Coquille department as part of a settlement agreement.
Benfield, 61, grew up in Newport, got a degree in biology from Oregon State University, traveled a year, entered law school at Willamette University, found it too small and transferred to the UO’s law school.
She came back to Newport – “I never wanted to leave here,” she says — to start her 36-year career working mostly as a defense attorney, including handling cases for indigent defendants. She now lives in her parents’ longtime family home.
“I know this community well,” Benfield told a Lincoln County League of Women Voters candidate forum last month. “My heart and soul are in the community … I want to make things better.”
The turmoil
There has been more than three years of turmoil in the district attorney’s office, foreshadowed by the 2020 May primary election campaign.
Danforth, who had worked two years in the district attorney’s office, challenged and defeated Jonathan Cable, who had been appointed to the position five months earlier by Gov. Kate Brown. Her $39,000 self-funded campaign was highlighted by an aggressive social media presence and advertising – striking for their size and tone for such local races.
Danforth took office in January 2021 and — which can be typical with such changes — longtime deputy district attorneys began leaving. The office has struggled to recruit and keep attorneys since; it is budgeted for eight deputy district attorneys but has 6½ at the moment, including two new hires in the past five months. Currently the longest- serving deputy district attorney has been there six years.
In Danforth’s three years as district attorney, political or office issues often broke into view outside the courthouse, including:
- A months-long fight with county commissioners in early 2022 over Danforth’s desire to hire longtime sheriff’s Detective Abby Dorsey to be one of her investigators, culminating in a compromise allowing it. But tired of the turmoil, Dorsey returned to the sheriff’s office 15 months later to work nights as a patrol deputy in Waldport.
- A June 2023 federal lawsuit by former deputy district attorney Kenneth “Rusty” Park alleged that Danforth and former chief deputy Lynn Howard violated his rights of free speech, right of association for his union activities, and due process after being put on administrative leave in January 2022.
- Wallace got pulled into a controversy last year when Danforth objected to the county rejecting her request to create a second chief deputy position and sued commissioners in circuit court. In December, an outside judge ruled in the commissioner’s favor. In the meantime, Howard left to work in Linn County and Danforth promoted Wallace to the chief deputy’s position.
When asked in April by the Lincoln County Leader newspaper about her decision not to seek another term, Danforth said in part, “At this time, I don’t wish to comment on why I chose not to run for re-election” adding that she was “extremely proud of the accomplishments I have made during my term.”
Compared with four years ago, the May primary campaign for the Lincoln County district attorney’s office is very mild.
Benfield has $5,000 in her campaign account, according to the Oregon Elections Division, with her own and a handful of other contributions from local lawyers, and using it for lawn signs and other material.
Wallace said she has discouraged campaign contributions, using $1,000 of her own money for filing fees and other expenses.
Benfield: Rebuild the office
Previous district attorneys say legal issues or courtroom appearances were often the least of their headaches. What took up much of their time was managing an office of more than two dozen people, learning the ropes of a mostly unionized workforce, budget issues, and working with other county departments, outside agencies and programs.
Despite their different backgrounds, there’s not a lot of disagreement between Wallace and Benfield on the main issues facing the district attorney’s office – more of a difference who can best to handle them. The issues include recruiting and retaining staff, bringing stability to the office, more consistency to how offenses, especially misdemeanors, are charged, implementing Measure 110 changes, and communication with law enforcement and other agencies.
Both Wallace and Benfield say smaller, rural district attorney offices can often struggle with recruiting and retaining staff. Many young attorneys arrive to get experience, then for a variety of reasons move on to larger offices in metro areas, private firms or state agencies that pay substantially more.
Benfield said her first order of business is to find a strong chief deputy to help her run and rebuild the office and to train and mentor less experienced prosecutors. “You have to have a strong No. 2,” she told YachatsNews.
The second is simply to show up every day, a veiled criticism of Danforth’s presence in the office. “There’s an absolute lack of anybody at the helm,” Benfield said. “I have seen an absolute downhill in the district attorney’s office. It’s the environment there.”
Benfield said it will take time to rebuild the office by talking to each of the current staff and recruiting new staff – including advocating for better pay – to help create a work environment where people want to learn and stay. “You want to find people who want to be there,” she said.
Benfield said she also wants to bring a consistency to how many crimes are charged, which she says currently seems haphazard or random depending on who is prosecuting the case.
One of the biggest challenges facing the district attorney’s office is to work with judges, police agencies and treatment organizations devise a local but state-mandated “deflection” program by September to deal with changes the 2024 Legislature made to Ballot Measure 110 drug laws.
Benfield told the candidate forum last month that she would advocate for more resources for treatment and crisis intervention programs. “Over half of the people I represent have mental health disorders,” she said. “Jail is not a treatment center.”
Wallace: Recruit, train, supervise
As chief deputy district attorney, Wallace said she assigns and monitors caseloads, schedules and deadlines – trying to bring guidance to the process and uniformity to charges. What she’s learned in the Lincoln, Lane and Coos county offices can benefit the organization she wants to put together as district attorney here, Wallace said.
“No disrespect to Ms. Benfield,” Wallace told the April candidate forum, “she doesn’t have that experience” of working with a large staff and making decisions on whether to proceed with charges or not.
Wallace said the Lincoln County office also needs to raise its recruiting profile, making sure to continually reach out to and have a presence at Oregon’s three law schools and elsewhere to find attorneys who believe in public service rather than compete with higher-paying private firms.
“You have to set yourself apart,” she said. “You have to find people who want to be in the prosecution field, who want to be career prosecutors and to live in a small town. It really goes back to what you’re going to get in the job … more trials, ore experience.”
The office also has to help law enforcement agencies meet the challenges of the recriminalization of low-level drug laws that will come in September with the state’s Measure 110 changes, Wallace said. That means working with judges, law enforcement, treatment organizations and other county departments who will deal with the changes just four months away.
The county’s robust Drug Court is one example, she told YachatsNews, one of the established tools the county can use to get people into treatment or other programs.
“The recriminalization is good,” Wallace said. “That’s how we can get people help. Measure 110 took away the incentive for treatment. Deflection is a good first step. It’s not onerous, but a carrot that can be used to help people.”
Another goal, Wallace said, is to mend the relationships with county commissioners, work well with other departments and “change the us versus them perception.”
“I think I’m ready,” Wallace said of the next stage of her career. “I have the knowledge and experience. I really think I’m ready for it.”