On the rare occasion there’s a judges’ race in Oregon, it’s probably even more rare that Eugene Weekly would have an open case in the Lane County Circuit Court at the same time.
In March, Elisha Young, Eugene Weekly’s former business manager, pleaded guilty to five felony counts of theft in the embezzlement case that almost closed the paper in late 2023. She will be sentenced on May 27. With an open case, Eugene Weekly has a direct conflict of interest in the judges’ race and will not be endorsing either judicial candidate in the May primary election, but is giving each candidate in May’s primary a platform to share who they are and why they are running.
Incumbent Judge Amit Kapoor runs against Pro Tem Judge Katina Saint Marie in the rare contested race for the position on the Circuit Court bench, second district, position 6. Eugene Weekly sat down with both candidates ahead of the primary, asking questions submitted by EW readers in response to an April 7 email newsletter.
Kapoor is an immigrant from India who grew up in poverty. When he thinks about his upbringing, he says the job feels personal.
“In a very genuine way, I get to say I’m living the American dream,” he says. “I was born relatively poor, no property, no political connections.”
He imagines getting to tell a younger version of himself: You will get to be a judge, and you will get to uphold the rule of law. “That’s like out of a storybook,” he says.
Before joining the bench, Kapoor worked as a public defender. He says he felt the impact of his work while supporting people at the intersection of mental health, addiction and homelessness. He describes the criminal justice system as a place where people in need deserve wraparound support, even when they lack access to it.
As a Lane County Circuit Court judge, Kapoor estimates he has worked, in one way or another, on roughly 12,000 cases, from traffic tickets to murder cases. He brings an educator’s background to the bench, having taught political and social psychology since 1999. He says the discipline has shaped how he thinks about justice.
Kapoor says he makes an effort to bring an educator’s thoroughness and patience to his courtroom. When presiding over juvenile dependency cases, Kapoor says he has printed out lengthy reports and shown his annotations to parents so they understand he’s read their cases in full. “I need that parent to know that I’m not just rubber-stamping something,” he says. “I want them to have trust in the system and know that we’re not here to snatch their babies, that we are paying attention.”
On appeals, Kapoor says he doesn’t take them personally. “I sleep very comfortably knowing that if I got it wrong, someone will check my work,” he says. He adds that the overwhelming majority of appeals filed against his rulings have affirmed his decisions.
Saint Marie came to the law “organically,” she says. In the late 1990s, while working as a legal secretary at a Springfield family law firm, she found herself on the other side of the courtroom. Beginning to work in law, she herself became a litigant seeking a restraining order, unable to afford an attorney, with children aged 7 and 1.
“That was a really scary time,” she says. “I had to do a lot of safety planning.”
Her experience pointed her toward law school at the University of Oregon, she says, and toward a career helping people who had landed in a position like hers. She built her practice around supporting low-income clients, incarcerated women, and children in the foster care system.
While in law school, Saint Marie volunteered with the Portia Project, an organization that assisted incarcerated women at the Coffee Creek Correctional Facility in Wilsonville. The experience, she says, opened her eyes to what happens after sentencing. “News stories always stop when someone is sentenced, and we don’t follow them on that journey,” she says. Seeing the inside of a prison for that first time, she says, made that gap impossible to ignore.
She later opened her own family law practice in 2013, often taking clients at low rates, and has since added juvenile dependency work and mediation training to her practice. Since 2023, she has served as a pro tem judge on the Lane County bench.
As a pro tem judge, she has presided over cases where one party couldn’t afford a lawyer. In one instance, a one-day trial stretched to three. “It’s tempting to shortcut that,” she says. “But I know what it sounds like when someone feels like they didn’t have their day in court.”
Saint Marie noted that 16 of Lane County’s 17 sitting judges were originally placed on the bench by a governor, and she’s asking voters not to be apathetic about this election. “Look at my record, compare it with others’ and decide which person would be better suited to serve them, their families and their neighbors,” she says.
Ballots go out April 29 and the Primary Election is May 19. Read the full Q&A with the judge candidates at EugeneWeekly.com.