Ginger Mooney & the Saudi Bail Money

Part I: Benton County

Nearly four and a half years ago, at the local circuit court in Corvallis, a student of Oregon State University was arraigned on ten counts of violations of statute ORS 163.684: Encouraging Child Sexual Abuse in the First Degree, i.e. child porn. This was a Class B felony for which, if convicted, the defendant could expect to serve a maximum sentence of ten years’ imprisonment.

The student, Waleed Ali H. Alharthi, was in the United States from Saudi Arabia due to his country’s generous international education funding program, and in Oregon, specifically, presumably due to its appealing universities, landscape, and culture.

As it would turn out, Alharthi could not have picked a more hospitable county courtroom in which to face criminal charges, nor could he have chosen a more accommodating and resourceful attorney.

Ginger Mooney, partner in the firm Van Ness Mooney, based in Salem, was retained as Alharthi’s attorney, and she notified the court of her representation the day of his arraignment.

Alharthi’s bail, otherwise known as “security,” was set for $500,000, and a ten percent deposit was produced less than a week later by a Los Angeles-based representative of the Royal Consulate.

The conditions of release were such that Alharthi was not allowed access to the internet, and that he would “surrender his passport to Benton County TCA.”¹ This order had a curious entry at the bottom, stating that the matter was continued to “9–15–18.” The handwritten date — four years in the future — is frankly a bizarre “mistake” for a court employee to have made in 2014.

Regardless, Mooney quickly moved to have the conditions of Alharthi’s release amended. First, less than a month after he posted bail, she moved to allow her client access to the internet “on campus facilities” so that his scholarship remained in “good standing,” and so that he could “transfer and withdraw funds from foreign banking institutions.”

Two weeks later, she filed an ex parte motion to retrieve her client’s passport — his “only form of official identification” — from the court so that he could “register for university classes.” This was granted the same day.

Benton’s TCA, Linda Hukari, told me that Mooney “returned the passport on 9/29/2014,” as per the judge’s order, but could not give me any evidence that Mooney had actually done so. This is perplexing since court records are open to the public, and nothing in the register of actions or case document list suggests that anything happened on that date.

Two months later, Mooney moved to allow Alharthi to go to Washington state for “testing relevant to his defense… for approximately five hours.”

Mooney filed this motion on the morning of the alleged testing — in and of itself, a bit of a gamble. Testing that could prove the innocence of an accused child porn aficionado would cost a defendant major money; would not be so whimsically and last-minutedly scheduled (or cancelled); and most importantly, in order for the test results to hold up in court, it would require some positive identification.

Yet nowhere in her motion or accompanying declaration did Ginger Mooney ask to borrow back Alharthi’s passport — allegedly his “only form of official identification” — so that he might make the trip.

Two status checks and a settlement conference later, Alharthi failed to show up to court for a scheduled hearing on April 2, 2015. The order revoking his recognizance release and the documents regarding bail forfeiture are curiously unable to be downloaded through Oregon’s online records system, OJIN, meaning that they are now possibly confidential.

What followed Alharthi’s no-show is perhaps the most perplexing part of the case: the tussle between the state and Mooney over the Saudi Consulate’s bail deposit.

On April 14, 2015, Benton County Deputy District Attorney Carrie Wineland moved the court to “enter an order declaring the full security release amount [be] forfeited pursuant to ORS 135.280(3)” based on the student’s failure to appear. In other words, Ms. Wineland was asking the court to order that $500,000 was owed to the state, not just the $50,000 already deposited.

The affidavit accompanying the motion mentioned that the DA’s office had learned, through a Transportation Security Administration [TSA] official, that Alharthi had flown “out of Mexico City, Mexico bound for Paris, France on March 25, 2015.”

Literally the only way that the TSA could have known about Mr. Waleed Ali H. Alharthi’s travel arrangements is if Mr. Waleed Ali H. Alharthi was traveling under his own name — i.e. using his “only form of official identification” instead of a forged one. In other words, he still had his passport.²

Ten days later, Ms. Wineland moved the court to reconsider its decision regarding the security money. Based on an earlier communication from court staff, Judge Donohue had indicated that he was leaving it at $50,000, and not seeking to bill the Saudi Consulate or Alharthi for the outstanding $450,000.

The language in Ms. Wineland’s motion suggests that she was perplexed to be having to explain bail to a long-sitting judge. Indeed, the statutes regarding bail and forfeiture are very clear: it is not discretionary for a judge to order an amount less than the “entire security amount.”

Two weeks after Ms. Wineland found herself in this position, Mooney, amazingly, appeared and gave a response to the DA’s motion, arguing for the bail money to be left at $50,000, and citing a case, State v. Normile, which did not actually seem to apply, nor did it concern a defendant who had fled.

Regardless, I have read statute ORS 135.280(3), and it plainly states that after a defendant fails to appear, and is clearly not coming back (after 30 days), “the court shall enter judgment for the state…for the entire security amount set under ORS 135.265 and the costs of the proceedings.”

Again, that “security amount” had been set by the court at $500,000, five months prior to Alharthi’s flight.

One must revel in the amount of nerve it took for Ginger Mooney to appear in Benton County Circuit Court, advocating for her child-porn-lovin’, bail-jumpin’ client — whom it is not unreasonable to believe she abetted — and waving her 90% off coupon. That is some serious chutzpah. Most attorneys would have sat the hell down or slunk out the back and never appeared in that courthouse again.

And a week later, her boldness paid off, when Judge Matthew Donohue inexplicably agreed with Mooney instead of Oregon’s own statutes.

There are so many plot holes and inconsistencies and oopsies with this case, not to mention the funky documents in the file, and particularly those that cannot be downloaded.

The handwritten date of four years in the future on the arraignment paperwork raises concerns that the court’s records have possibly already been tampered with by someone with access to them. And Judge Donohue’s ruling regarding bail gives pause that something even more untoward may have occurred.

Federal investigators are clearly working on this matter, and Mooney has hired one of the state’s top ethics lawyers, clearly for good reason. It remains to be seen how many others will need their own defense attorneys.

Ginger Genevieve Mooney had three more clients who were Saudi Arabian students who fled Oregon’s criminal justice system, and each case will be the subject of an in-depth examination of its own plot holes, inconsistencies, and oopsie case documents.

Next up, Part II: Polk County. It’s really, really bad.

¹ TCA = Trial Court Administrator.

² This begs the question: what is sitting in Benton County Circuit Court’s — or more likely at this point, the F.B.I.’s — left desk drawer?