Former police officer decertified in Oregon after sex scandal

SALEM, Ore. – Fellow police officers voted Thursday in a Salem boardroom to take away a former officer's ability to do police work in Oregon for 10 years.

The decision, by sheriffs, current and retired police officers and citizens, follows a sex scandal that already forced Justin Morris' resignation from the Hillsboro Police Department.

Morris plans to fight the decision even though he does admit having sexual contact with the girlfriend of a man he was helping arrest for drunken driving. He gave her a ride home that night because she wasn’t in any condition to drive. Then he returned to her home later, while on duty, and had sex with her.

But the issues around Morris go beyond that. He's the police officer who took a bullet answering a mental health call at a home in Hillsboro and received the department's highest honors for it.

But two years later the vote by a jury of his peers, so to speak, means Morris' future as a police officer in Oregon is in jeopardy.

"He violated the public's trust and public safety professionals," said Eriks Gabliks with the Department of Public Standards Safety and Training. "And that's what this group is empowered to do by the Legislature – to ensure that those people that do protect and serve are at the highest of moral (and) ethical values."

Before the sex scandal that forced his resignation, Morris himself made sizable accusations against the people who investigated the shooting that wounded him.

He said he believes it was possibly a result of friendly fire and the bullet that struck him in his upper body came not from the man who went to prison for it, Sepp Tokanaga, but a Washington County sheriff’s deputy who was also on the scene.

Morris' attorney Philip Lebenbaum, told KATU News in a statement that "Justin was facing the suspect, but was shot in the back of his right shoulder near his spine."

Lebenbaum offered a photo (at right) taken at the emergency room as evidence. That photo shows a large wound on Morris' upper back.

The Washington County Sheriff's Office says the evidence is clear that it was Tokanaga who shot Morris.

"In fact, Mr. Tokanaga admitted in court that he shot Mr. Morris and he was convicted of the crime," the sheriff's office said in a statement late Thursday night.

Morris further claims prosecutors and an attorney for the police union encouraged him to see circumstances "their way." Prosecutors call that claim outrageous and false.

In the statement to KATU, Lebenbaum indicates this isn't over. He said, "Mr. Morris expects to request a hearing before an Administrative Law Judge to review the recommendation of the Department of Public Standards Safety and Training."

That means he'll get to tell a judge why he thinks he should still be able to do police work somewhere in Oregon, if not Hillsboro.

If Morris doesn't win in Oregon, he can try to work as a police officer in another state, but the decertification goes into a national database that 33 states contribute to and use. So that would show up on his record.