Prominent Legal Advocate To Be Freed After 37 Years In Prison

The Oregon Board of Parole granted a release date of Jan. 9 to prominent incarcerated legal expert Mark Wilson, whose litigation efforts inside prison have helped thousands of other prisoners. Wilson was previously the subject of a HuffPost investigation, which detailed the state Department of Corrections’ pattern of retaliation against him.

Wilson’s upcoming release date is only possible because of his recent lawsuit against the corrections department, which ended in a settlement earlier this year. That lawsuit was the second time the department agreed to settle with Wilson over retaliation claims.

In 1987, when Wilson was 18 and addicted to methamphetamine, he participated in a double homicide during a home burglary. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to two life sentences with the possibility of parole in exchange for testifying in his codefendants’ trials. The family members of the victims, Rod and Lois Houser, opposed Wilson’s release.

Wilson started working as an incarcerated legal assistant shortly after he entered prison as a teenager, because he saw it as a way he could make a positive contribution even if he spent the rest of his life behind bars. The Supreme Court held in 1977 that people in prison have a constitutional right of access to the courts, requiring prisons to provide law libraries or assistance from people with legal training.

Wilson quickly developed a reputation among prisoners and lawyers on the outside as a talented and fearless legal assistant, taking on complex cases that came with significant risk of retaliation. In 2001, Wilson spearheaded a class-action lawsuit against the DOC on behalf of a group of prisoners who were being denied treatment for hepatitis C, an infection that affected about 30% of Oregon’s prison population at the time. The lawsuit ended in a settlement, which led to improvements in the department’s evaluation and treatment policies — and forced the department to spend millions on hepatitis C medication.

“That lawsuit and the resulting settlement of it has saved thousands of lives and I attribute that to Mark’s dedication,” civil rights attorney Michelle Burrows, who helped Wilson file the hepatitis C lawsuit, said in Wilson’s first parole hearing in 2009. “Mark taught me everything I know, I truly believe, about prisoner litigation,” Burrows said.

Soon after the settlement, DOC transferred Wilson to a remote, more dangerous prison, and blocked him from working as a legal assistant. He sued the corrections department for retaliation in 2006 and eventually reached a settlement that transferred him back to Salem in the Oregon State Correctional Institution, where he resumed work as a legal assistant.

Oregon has a complicated three-part parole process. Generally, after an individual has served their minimum sentence, they have a hearing where the parole board assesses their rehabilitation. If the board determines the individual is “likely to be rehabilitated within a reasonable period of time,” there is a second hearing to set a tentative release date. Ahead of that tentative release date, there is an “exit interview” hearing to assess the individual’s release plan, their mental and emotional health, and their disciplinary record in prison. If the board rules in favor of the individual, it sets an actual release date.

In practice, at each step, the hearings typically focus extensively on the crime committed. The process is so convoluted that Wilson wrote an 88-page guide to help others prepare for their rehabilitation hearing.

Wilson’s first parole hearing was in 2009. By then, he had completed years of drug treatment, volunteered in the prison’s hospice, earned his GED and associates degree, facilitated victim empathy groups, and raised thousands of dollars for the children of a woman who was murdered, in addition to his legal work. His only disciplinary violation was from 1991 when he and 20 other people protested prison wages by declining to return to work for an afternoon.

Asked by board members what led to his crimes, Wilson described how he coped with childhood sexual abuse through drugs and alcohol, and became addicted to meth by his senior year of high school. The board ruled against Wilson, citing his descriptions of his childhood as “attempts to deflect blame” and “minimize his actual accountability.” The board accused him of “being able to recite the ‘right words’ about guilt, empathy and responsibility” without experiencing “genuine humility and contrition.”

Wilson did not request another hearing until years later. In his 2017 hearing, he said that he did not want to cause his victims’ family members additional pain, but he also recognized his own family’s need to see him try to come home. Again, the board ruled against him, this time accusing him of “shifting the burden and harm to the victims from these hearings off of himself and on to his family.”

Wilson finally received a finding of rehabilitation in 2019. By then, he had earned his Bachelor’s degree from the University of Oregon, served as a teaching assistant, completed a 200-hour yoga instructor training program, and became the first incarcerated person to be part of an Oregon state legislature working group. The board set a projected release date of Jan. 9, 2027, with the possibility of release as soon as August 2022 if he received time reductions for good behavior.

But in 2021, Wilson feared his chances of ever leaving prison had been dashed by a baseless disciplinary finding.

Several years prior, top Oregon Department of Corrections officials traveled to Norway to tour their comparatively humane prisons. When they returned, they unveiled the so-called “Oregon Way,” a “philosophical approach to corrections” rooted in “humanizing and normalizing the prison environment.”

DOC library coordinator Pam McKinney, Wilson’s boss in the law library, believed in the Oregon Way, hanging pictures and motivational quotes on the walls of the library. It was in this spirit that McKinney placed a plastic children’s toy phone on Wilson’s desk in early 2020, a joking reference to the number of phone calls he received at work.

When Wilson saw the toy phone on his desk, he laughed politely and moved it to a nearby shelf, where it remained for nearly a year. But in January 2021, prison officials confiscated the toy phone, removed Wilson from his job as a legal assistant, and told him he was under investigation. At the time, Wilson was working on several high-stakes cases that had significant financial implications for DOC, including a class-action lawsuit on behalf of prisoners whose medical records were breached.

Later that year, prison officials formally accused Wilson of violating several prison rules, most significantly, “compromising” McKinney, a prison employee. They cited the toy phone as “evidence” of an “unauthorized personal relationship,” despite providing no evidence of such a relationship.

The corrections department held a disciplinary hearing during which Wilson was handcuffed and locked in a cage without a lawyer or access to documents he planned to use in his defense.

Wilson was found guilty of the misconduct allegations and punished with four months in solitary confinement, one of the harshest punishments available within Oregon’s prison system. Barred from doing legal work, many of his cases languished. Most critically, the misconduct finding shattered Wilson’s chance of release.

During the exit interview, the third stage of the parole process, the board reviews the individual’s disciplinary record and can cite misconduct as a reason to defer release for up to 10 years at a time, indefinitely.

“Essentially,” Wilson told HuffPost in 2022, “they could keep me in prison the rest of my life based on this misconduct report.”

In late 2021, Wilson sued prison officials, again alleging retaliation. His 2022 potential early release date came and went as the litigation moved forward. In April 2024, Wilson agreed to settle the case in exchange for DOC vacating the disciplinary findings, processing his request for good-time credit, and paying him $50,000.

As a result, Wilson headed into his exit interview last week with no disciplinary record since his 1991 wage protest action.

Wilson has three job offers to continue his legal work, including one from the Oregon Justice Resource Center, the nonprofit that represented him in the recent retaliation lawsuit and employs formerly incarcerated people Wilson used to work with in the law library.

At Wilson’s final parole hearing earlier this month, family members of the victims restated their opposition to his release, saying they did not believe he was remorseful about the crime. Deschutes County District Attorney Steve Gunnels said in a letter to the board that Wilson’s efforts to seek release demonstrated an “ongoing pattern of self-entitlement and callousness” toward his victims.

Wilson’s parole packet included support letters from former Deschutes County District Attorney John Hummel and state Sen. Michael Dembrow (D), who attended Wilson’s college graduation ceremony and invited him to participate in a legislative workgroup on prison education. Shirley Fishbaugh, Wilson’s 93-year-old grandmother, wrote it was her “greatest wish to see him sitting once again next to me in my home.”

Several people who were incarcerated with Wilson wrote of the transformative impact he had on their time in prison. “I honestly received more help from Mark in my first couple months than I have ever received from DOC in general,” wrote Cayce French, who described how Wilson looked out for him when he was transferred out of juvenile custody into adult prison.

Wilson’s dedication as a legal assistant “was unparalleled,” wrote Matthew Sexton. “He was always approachable whether he was on the clock or not, to answer questions, concerns or simply just provide an ear for someone in emotional distress. Countless [adults in custody], myself included, greatly benefited from his generosity of his time, wisdom, and support.”