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Joshua K. Marquis
 Joshua K. Marquis is no shrinking violet. He’ll tell you that.
Marquis, DA of Clatsop County, Oregon, an NDAA state director and co-founder of the Media Relations Committee, speaks his mind freely, no matter how controversial the issue, particularly when a matter of principle is involved. He admits that he loves being on TV and seeing his name in the press, but he points out that there’s a reason: He is unrelenting in his belief that prosecutors “must reach out, be forthright and available to the press” to get their story out to the public. To this end, he has skillfully cultivated the media and urged his prosecutor colleagues to do the same.
Asked whether he considers himself a media gadfly, he goes the questioner one better, declaring, with a chuckle, “No, I wouldn’t say gadfly. I’d be a little blunter. I’m probably considered a media hog.” Some of his defense attorney critics call him a “publicity hound,” but Marquis responds, “I think people in the public eye who say they don’t like the attention are being disingenuous.”
He also has his admirers, even among defense attorneys. After Marquis successfully prosecuted a woman on charges of pushing her boyfriend off a cliff, in a trial televised by Court TV, winning a second-degree manslaughter conviction, defense attorney Scott Asphaug said Marquis had handled the case professionally, declaring, “He provided me with every piece of paper he had. A lot of prosecutors would have tried to hide the ball. He didn’t.”
Marquis is well known throughout Oregon for his impassioned newspaper op-ed articles and speeches on controversial criminal justice issues, especially victims’ rights and the death penalty (he’s for it). On the national scene, he was a longtime commentator on Court TV. He has appeared on NBC’s Dateline and has defended his pro-capital punishment stand on Good Morning America, Geraldo Rivera Show, and National Public Radio.
Nothing about Josh Marquis is low-key, including the way he became DA of Clatsop County, which occupies the picturesque northwestern tip of the Oregon coast.
It was 1994 and Marquis was chief deputy DA of Deschutes County. He had earlier spent a year as a defense attorney, four years as deputy DA of Lincoln County, a year as speechwriter for then California Attorney General John Van De Kamp and 11 years in the Lane County DA’s office. In between his prosecutor jobs in Lane and Lincoln counties, he worked as a reporter for a legal newspaper in Los Angeles.
The DA of Clatsop County, Julie Leonhardt, had been removed from office after being indicted on a dozen criminal charges, including framing two police officers on phony drug charges after her lover, a convicted felon, had been ticketed for reckless driving. The supermarket tabloids had a field day with the story. And the governor of Oregon, Barbara Roberts, was looking for a successor. She chose Josh Marquis.
At his swearing-in, in the same courtroom in which his predecessor had lied to the judge and had been convicted, Marquis recalled the scene in the film Philadelphia, where Tom Hanks, playing an ill and dying lawyer, is on the witness stand being questioned by fellow lawyer Denzel Washington, who asks Hanks what it is that he likes about being a lawyer. Hanks replies, “Every once in a while, but not very often, but every once in a while, you get to be a part of justice.” Marquis then pounded his point home, declaring, “The difference is that in this job, you get to be a part of justice not once in a while, but every single day, in every decision you make.”
Sixty days later, Marquis had to run for a full four-year term and won by a 79-21 percent margin. He has been re-elected without opposition ever since. He admits with some pride that he’s regarded as a colorful character in his jurisdiction, adding, “But I’m a reasoned colorful character.”
In fact, for the last nine years he has literally played a colorful character—a cowardly sheriff—in a local theatre group’s annual presentation of a comedy, Shanghaied in Astoria, a rowdy burlesque set in Astoria’s early wild and bawdy era. He has only two lines, but year after year, the audience roars with delight when they see their DA in a 19th century sheriff’s costume.
The circumstances of Marquis’s marriage were so colorful that they were the subject of a feature story in People magazine. Marquis and Cindy Price met in 1995 on a Court TV-sponsored AOL message board devoted to the then raging O.J. Simpson trial. Cindy was a former analyst at a conservative think tank. Josh Marquis was a liberal Democrat. The one thing they had in common was their belief in Simpson’s guilt. Marquis, Price and other members of the pro-prosecution group split off into a private e-mail group. When about 50 members of the group met in California, Marquis and Price came face to face and immediately hit it off. From this point, the e-mail messages turned romantic and they married in 1996.
Now heading for his third full term, Joshua Marquis supervises a staff of five attorneys and a support staff of 10 in a jurisdiction of about 35,000 population. Astoria, the principal city (population: 9,000) is situated at the point where the Columbia River (five miles wide at this point) flows into the Pacific Ocean. The oldest American settlement west of the Rockies, Astoria was the western terminus of the Lewis & Clark Expedition in 1805. Originally a thriving fishing and lumber center, it has become more of a tourist attraction in recent years, although some of the fish processing element remains. Two sardine packing plants are currently running around the clock. The city’s Scandinavian heritage is so deep that at one time one of the city’s two newspapers was published in Finnish.
Despite the scenic “small town America” atmosphere that has made it the locale for a number of films, including Free Willy and Kindergarten Cop, Astoria and Clatsop County are no strangers to crime. Marquis says, “Seventy five to eighty-five percent of the crimes that we prosecute are related to drug use or drug dealing. I can’t remember a homicide case here in which drugs were not involved.”
Marquis says that even before he became an elected DA, “I always felt that it was the responsibility of the prosecutor, and particularly in smaller communities where the DA is one of the few really independent officials, to speak the truth and shame the devil. Whether the problem is drugs or something else, you have a duty to stand up and tell the people that and damn the consequences. If you are brutally honest with people and tell them what you really believe, political success will usually follow. That’s because people are so anxious to simply be told the truth for a change by people in political life, and I think prosecutors have the unique ability to be able to do that, because people look to us as community leaders.”
Marquis firmly believes that the role of a prosecutor, “particularly in a community the size of mine, is to set the tone for law enforcement and not be afraid of bringing any problems directly to the legislative branch.” He noted that on the night of the interview for this profile he was going before the Clatsop County Commission “and raise all kinds of hell” about the proposed county budget. “They’re not planning to cut my budget,” he pointed out, “but they’re planning to cut other categories which I think would greatly diminish the quality of life. I’m one of only two elected county officials, so I can speak out.”
Within NDAA, Marquis has spoken out vigorously for his view that prosecutors should have a larger public voice and respond to prosecutor bashing. He was a prime mover in the creation of the Media Relations Committee and was its first co-chair, with Paul Logli. In 1999 he was so infuriated by apparent flaws in a series by The Chicago Tribune on cases of alleged prosecutorial misconduct that he was influential in having NDAA conduct research on the series. The research confirmed his suspicions about the series’ flaws and bias. Stu VanMeveren, then president of NDAA, wrote a letter condemning the series to the Pulitzer Prize Board, which was considering the Tribune series for an award. The Tribune series didn’t win.
From his long experience with the media, Marquis knows the ropes. “It’s much easier to get your message across,” he says, “if you know how the press works. When are the deadlines, by what time does a TV station have to have its film in the can so they can get it back for the five o’clock news. Really very simple stuff like that can make a huge difference in getting your message out. As a former journalist, when I’m being interviewed I know what the reporter is going to use. If you have a couple of good sound bites for TV or a newspaper interview and you’re talking to a reporter who has limited time or space, you know how to handle the interview and you can tell what’s going to end up as the theme of the story.”
Marquis told a newspaper interviewer, “Since I was 16 years old, I have felt passionately about issues and I have wanted to tell people what I think.” In an interview with a reporter for The Oregonian newspaper, he said he stood out, sartorially at least, when he was a student at the University of Oregon in the early 1970s. College friend Drex Heikes, now an editor of the Los Angeles Times, recalled, “This was a place where everybody wore blue jeans, and Josh ran around in tweed jackets. He was very much a law-and-order guy.” Although as a youth Marquis marched with his parents in civil rights and anti-Vietnam War protests, he became disenchanted with the anti-war movement when he covered it as a reporter for the campus newspaper in 1971 and 1972. “I thought the (movement’s) time had come and gone,” he told the reporter for The Oregonian. “I thought burning down the ROTC building wasn’t going to end the war any sooner.”
He had already decided that he wanted to be a prosecutor.
Marquis says he remains a prosecutor “because I think it’s the best job in the world. I was a defense lawyer briefly and I was miserably unhappy, because my impression was—and I have a number of good friends who are defense attorneys and they are good and moral people—the only thing that really mattered was making money.
“When I speak at high school career day programs, I tell the students that being a prosecutor is the only job where you get paid to do the right thing. It’s what I call a morally luxurious job.”
If Josh Marquis were a Republican, he may have become the U.S. attorney for Oregon, for he was on the short list of prospects in 2000. But when George W. Bush became president that prospect was dashed and a Republican friend got the job. He admits some interest in being the attorney general of Oregon or working at the U.S. Department of Justice in a challenging job.
“But I’m spoiled,” he concludes, “I love trying cases. I would not want a job where all you did was administer. Besides, when you’re the DA, you’re the boss. You decide which cases are going to be prosecuted. You’re a force for good in your community. There’s no job like it.”
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