Oregon Tries to Block Defense Access to Ecclesia Youths

Oregon’s Justice Department has entered the legal fight over whether defense attorneys in the upcoming manslaughter trial of four Ecclesia Athletic Assn. members should be allowed to talk to children taken from the group by the state.

State Appellate Division attorneys filed a request Friday that the Oregon Supreme Court block a Dec. 7 order by Clackamas County Judge John Lowe giving defense attorneys access to children taken from the group’s rural Oregon camp.

Four adult Ecclesia members face trial Feb. 6 in Clackamas County in the Oct. 14 beating death of Dayna Broussard, the 8-year-old daughter of the Los Angeles-based group’s founder, Eldridge Broussard Jr.

Defense attorneys for Willie Chambers, 35; Brian Brinson, 30; Frederick Doolittle, 28, and Constance Jackson, 37, have sought to interview some of the 53 children taken into state protective custody at the group’s farmhouse near Sandy, east of Portland, hours after the girl’s death.

The group originally organized the farm near Sandy as an athletic training center to train inner-city youths from Los Angeles. However, state officials have alleged that the children were subject to ritualistic abuse, some beaten hundreds of times while the others were forced to keep count.

The state attorneys were in a race with the clock in trying to block interviews with the children as Clackamas County prosecutors have been ordered to appear in Circuit Court next Tuesday to show why they should not be held in contempt of court for failing to produce the children.

Defense attorneys Wednesday were granted their request for the order after attempts to set up interviews with the children were stalled while prosecutors waited to see if the Justice Department would review the matter.

Virginia Linder, solicitor general for the state Justice Department, said the Supreme Court previously has ruled against trial court judges in criminal proceedings ordering the Children’s Services Division to produce children in its custody for defense interviews or parents to produce children for the same reason.

The question still undecided by the court is whether such judges can order prosecutors to produce a child for interviews when the child is in state custody, as in the Ecclesia case.