Chris Trotter

Hello there. I feel I have a moral obligation to tell the story of how Oregon lawyer Chris Trotter screwed me over. My name is Michael Strickland. If that name is familiar, allow me to refresh your memory. I was the news videographer who was attacked in the street while at work on July 7th,…

After initially being released on recognizance at about 4:23 AM the next morning and charged with two misdemeanors of Menacing and Disorderly Conduct, I was instructed to show up later that afternoon for an arraignment. This was all new to me as I had never been arrested before, never previously charged with a crime, and…

During the 11 days I was in jail, Chris Trotter visited me once. During that visit he informed me that the price was going up 250% from what he had originally told me, because it was now a felony case. When I was finally bailed out, thanks to the money raised by Oregon Firearms Federation…

On August 4th, about a week after the grand jury testimony, Chris Trotter called to tell me I had been indicted. But he left out some important additional information. Later that afternoon, I saw a post by Oregon Firearms Federation that had a link to the Oregonian article about me being indicted. I was now…

It wasn’t until about a month later that we finally received copies of the evidence, referred to as “discovery” in legal terms. This included all of the police reports associated with the event, phone call interviews detectives conducted with witnesses, emails that were sent in from other witnesses, and, most importantly, several video angles. This…

So this brings us to January of 2017. I was finally able to get Chris Trotter and Jason Short to respond to some of the things I had mentioned and brought up. They finally addressed the previously mentioned Harry Bray case, where the higher courts ruled that the defense has a right to text messages,…

As the trial was approaching, we received the list of witnesses that the prosecutors intended to call during the trial. These consisted mostly of the witnesses they had during the grand jury proceedings. However there was one glaring omission. We will call this witness K.T. to protect his identity. K.T., as it turned out, was…

On January 30th there was a hearing to go over pre trial motions. If memory serves, this was another one of those instances where Chris Trotter had me show up 30 minutes early because we were going to discuss things before going in, only to have Trotter not show up until 5 or 10 minutes…

The trial got underway, and for some inexplicable reason, Christopher Trotter and Jason Short agreed to the summary statement of: “On July 7th, 2016, on the steps of the Justice Center, a couple of blocks away from the courthouse here, there was a “Don’t shoot PDX” protest involving a large crowd. Mr. Strickland was in…

When the trial had finally gotten underway and witnesses were being called, district attorneys Kate Molina and Todd Jackson called John Barnett Slaughter to the stand. You may remember Slaughter as the one who filed the phony police report from an entirely separate non matter that Molina presented as fact. Well, it turns out he…