Salem, OR. – Official Release: Governor Tina Kotek’s attempts to weaken Oregon’s system for tracking and monitoring sex offenders have failed, but so did efforts to fix the broken system.
Senate Bills 819, 820, and 821 would have made it easier for dangerous sex offenders to avoid state monitoring, putting communities and victims at risk. Fortunately, these bills did not move forward. However, Republican-backed bills to improve the system and address a massive backlog also stalled.
“Oregon families can breathe a little easier knowing that these reckless bills are dead. But it’s frustrating that our solutions were ignored, leaving 12,500 sex offenders in Oregon unaccounted for,” said Senator Cedric Hayden (R-Fall Creek).
Right now, 18,000 sex offenders—12,500 living in Oregon— still need to be evaluated to determine how likely they are to reoffend. Republicans fought to fix this crisis, but Democrats blocked the solutions:
• Senate Bill 1008: Funded staffing to clear the sex offender risk assessment backlog and improved public access to offender information.
• Senate Bill 1009: Expanded the definition of “victim” so that more survivors could access critical information about sex offenders.
• Senate Bill 1068: Ensured that convicted sex offenders moving to Oregon would be classified under the same risk level they had in other states, preventing them from slipping through the cracks.
Danielle Tudor, a victim of the ‘Jogger Rapist’ Richard Gillmore, was forced to move out of Oregon when he was released from prison.
“I had no choice but to leave the state because I couldn’t live in a place where my rapist had more rights than I did. That’s unacceptable,” Tudor said. “The majority party is failing to prioritize the safety of Oregonians, and as a result, thousands of sex offenders remain unaccounted for. This is a catastrophic failure in leadership that is putting countless lives at risk.”
Republicans have worked with survivors like Danielle Tudor and Tiffany Edens and parents like Jane Mendoza and Courtney Gelbrich to push for stronger protections. Without action, the backlog remains, and we’ll never know who’s living next door, putting families at risk.
“In Oregon, we’ve proven that we can come together to protect victims, whether by increasing penalties for crimes like strangulation or clearing the decades-old backlog of rape kit testing,” Hayden added. “So, I struggle to understand why we can’t unite now to solve the longstanding issue created by the legislature of properly classifying sex offenders to better protect victims. We can do better, and there’s still time before the session ends to fund a solution.”
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