Christian Longo was convicted of the aggravated murders of his wife and three children in Waldport, a town on the Oregon coast in Lincoln County, in December 2001. He pleaded guilty to three of the seven counts brought against him and was found guilty of the other four by a jury. In 2003 the court imposed a sentence of death. The Oregon Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and the sentence in 2006, rejecting a series of challenges that ranged from the selection of the jury to the questions put to the jury at the penalty phase. In December 2022 the governor of Oregon commuted the death sentences of every prisoner then on the governor's list of those under sentence of death in the state, Longo among them, to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Christian Michael Longo was born on January 23, 1974, in Iowa. He married in 1993, and by 2001 he was 27 years old, with a wife and three children. His wife was Mary Jane. Their children were Zachery, Sadie and Madison. In 2001 the family moved from Michigan to the Oregon coast and lived in Waldport, a small town in Lincoln County.
In 2000, in Washtenaw County Circuit Court in Michigan, he pleaded guilty to four felony counts; eight other charges were dismissed, and he was sentenced to three years of probation and ordered to pay restitution. When the Oregon charges were filed, two Michigan warrants were outstanding against him, one for a probation violation and one for larceny.
Lincoln County authorities investigated the four deaths in the last days of December 2001. On December 28, 2001, Lincoln County authorities charged Longo with multiple counts of aggravated murder in connection with the deaths of his wife and three children. On the same day a federal arrest warrant was issued by the United States District Court for the District of Oregon, sitting in Eugene, charging him with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. By then he had left the state and was not in custody.
On January 11, 2002, the Federal Bureau of Investigation placed Longo on its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list as the 469th person listed since 1950, with a reward of up to $50,000 for information leading to his arrest, a little under two weeks after the charges were filed. On January 13, 2002, he was arrested in Mexico by Mexican officers and FBI agents. He agreed to return to the United States, so a formal extradition was not needed. Mexico does not ordinarily extradite a defendant who could face the death penalty, because it has no death penalty of its own. He arrived in Houston the morning after his arrest, was due before a federal magistrate there on the flight charge, and was then turned over to the Oregon authorities to be brought to Lincoln County. The manner of his return later became a ground of appeal.
The case was prosecuted in Lincoln County Circuit Court under the case number CC 016441. Longo was indicted on seven counts of aggravated murder. Counts 1 to 4 each concerned the death of one member of the family and alleged that there was more than one victim in the same criminal episode, an aggravating circumstance under ORS 163.095(1)(d). Counts 5 to 7 concerned the three children and rested on a further aggravating circumstance under ORS 163.095(1)(f).
The Lincoln County district attorney, who had held the office only since 2001, announced that her office would seek the death penalty, the first such case under her. In November 2002 the defense wrote to her proposing a meeting to see whether the case could be resolved without a trial, in the hope that the State would give up the death penalty in exchange for a guilty plea and a sentence of life. Oregon law allowed a district attorney to negotiate a plea where the public interest in effective justice would be served and the defendant acknowledged guilt and accepted responsibility. No agreement was reached.
The trial judge dealt with the defense motions in writing and in hearings. He dismissed most of the more than 20 pretrial motions, among them a request to move the trial out of Lincoln County. The defense challenged the statements Longo had made to the authorities after his return to the United States, arguing that he had not been allowed to speak to a lawyer immediately after his arrest and had not been given the warnings required by Miranda v. Arizona. The trial court ruled that they could be used at trial. The Oregon Supreme Court later set out the findings on which that ruling rested.
Before trial the defense also moved to bar a sentence of death, or of life, in his case on the ground that Oregon had failed to comply with the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations. The trial court denied the motion in a written order.
On Friday, February 14, 2003, in Newport, Longo pleaded guilty to counts 1, 4 and 7. Those counts covered the aggravated murder of his wife and two counts relating to the youngest child. He pleaded not guilty to the remaining four counts, which concerned the two older children, two counts for each child. The judge told him that the death penalty remained possible both for the murders to which he had pleaded guilty and for those he denied.
The district attorney stated in open court that the plea was not the product of any negotiation or bargain with the State. Defense counsel said the decision to plead guilty to those counts was Longo's own and declined to say what the strategy would be on the others, which would become clear at trial.
Jury selection for the trial on the four remaining counts began on February 18, 2003. Prospective jurors were examined individually, some over more than one day, and by February 26 forty-five of them had been questioned individually. On that day the State used a peremptory challenge on one prospective juror who had earlier been passed for cause. The defense objected that the State was striking jurors on the ground of race, an objection governed by Batson v. Kentucky. The trial court found that the defense had not made out a prima facie case, and the State then explained that it feared the juror might be unable to impose the death penalty. The trial court's written order recorded that it had no reason to believe the juror belonged to a racial minority. The trial itself was set to begin on March 10, 2003.
At trial a jury of twelve heard the case on the four counts concerning the two older children. The prosecution presented Longo as a con artist with a taste for the good life. The State relied on a number of witnesses, among them a relative of his wife and fellow workers, and the defense challenged some of that testimony as undisclosed in time or inadmissible. The trial court denied a defense motion for a mistrial.
The trial ended on Monday, April 7, 2003, when the jury returned its verdict after deliberating for less than five hours. It found Longo guilty of all four counts. The defense he put forward at trial was a denial that he had murdered the two older children.
Under Oregon law a person convicted of aggravated murder is sentenced either to death or to life imprisonment, and the choice is governed by four questions that the jury must answer in a separate penalty phase, under ORS 163.150(1)(b). The second question asked whether there was a probability that the defendant would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society. The fourth asked whether, taking into account all the evidence, including any mitigating circumstances, the defendant should receive a death sentence. The jury in Longo's case, which consisted of eight women and four men, heard evidence at the penalty phase in which Longo himself testified over three days. It deliberated for more than six hours and recommended death. The trial judge then formally imposed a sentence of death in Newport, and Longo became the 27th person on the death row of Oregon at the time.
In Oregon a sentence of death is reviewed directly and automatically by the Oregon Supreme Court. The court heard argument in the case, State v. Longo (docket S50474), on September 12, 2006. Counsel for Longo came from the Office of Public Defense Services and the State was represented by the Attorney General's office. The chief justice and five justices took part; one justice had retired before the decision and another did not participate. On November 9, 2006, the court filed its opinion and ruled, in its own words: "The judgment of conviction and the sentence of death are affirmed."
Longo had made 26 assignments of error. The court addressed some of them at length and disposed of the rest in a single sentence, finding them unpreserved, controlled by earlier decisions of the court, or without merit, and declining to discuss them further because that would not benefit the bench, the bar or the public.
The first challenge concerned the Vienna Convention and international law. Longo argued that an FBI agent acting in the role of a consular officer had misled him into returning voluntarily instead of insisting on formal extradition, and that for this reason neither a death sentence nor a sentence of life could lawfully be imposed. The court held that Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations creates no right that an individual can enforce, because the obligations it creates are enforceable only by the signatory states, as the United States Supreme Court had held in Sanchez-Llamas. The treaty grants permission to a consular officer and does not impose a duty to help a detained person obtain counsel. The extradition treaty between the United States and Mexico did not make formal extradition the only lawful means of return. The agency's own manual is not a source of law. Because Longo's first statements to the police came after he was already on his way back to the United States, his claim that he had acted in fear of Mexican detention also failed.
The second challenge concerned the statements themselves. The trial court had found that Longo never asked for a lawyer and never invoked his right to remain silent. It had found that he wanted to keep talking and chose which subjects to discuss. The Supreme Court held, following its decision in State v. Kell, that a suspect who has been warned may choose which subjects to discuss and which to avoid, so there was no violation.
The third concerned the prosecution's peremptory challenge. The court applied Batson v. Kentucky and Johnson v. California. It accepted that the burden on the defendant at the first stage is a light one, but it held that the strike of a single juror, without a pattern of strikes and without discriminatory questioning in the record, did not allow an inference of discrimination, and that it was bound by the trial court's finding about the juror's apparent race.
The fourth concerned discovery. The defense argued that the State had breached ORS 135.815 and the rule in Brady v. Maryland when a witness disclosed late gave an account that differed from that of the witness's spouse. The court held that the State had complied with the statute by providing the investigator's written memorandum, that there was no Brady violation because the jury was told of the doubts at trial, and that the defense had suffered no prejudice because it had notice and received continuances. The trial court had therefore been right to deny a mistrial and to refuse to strike the testimony.
The fifth concerned hearsay. A relative of his wife had been allowed to testify to statements the wife made shortly after a startling event. The court held that the statements were excited utterances under OEC 803(2), because the event was startling and the statements were made under its stress.
Finally, in a footnote the court rejected a claim that the jury had not been drawn from a fair cross-section of the community. Excluding jurors who are opposed to the death penalty is permitted under Lockhart v. McCree, as Longo conceded, the exclusion of convicted felons is permitted under State v. Compton, as he also conceded, and the excusal of individual jurors for financial hardship is lawful, because nothing in the record showed a systematic exclusion.
The challenges to the penalty phase began with Longo's argument that Bush v. Gore requires statewide standards for death sentencing and discovery about sentencing decisions across the state. The court followed its earlier decision in State v. Cunningham, which had rejected that requirement under both the Oregon and the federal constitutions, and found nothing in Bush v. Gore that undermined it.
Longo next argued that Apprendi v. New Jersey and Blakely v. Washington require proof beyond a reasonable doubt on the second and fourth of the jury's questions. As to the second question, the court held that the fact to be proved is the probability of future violence, that it must be proved beyond a reasonable doubt, and that "probability" means that the event is more likely than not to occur. As to the fourth question, the court held that the jury does not find facts but weighs the aggravating and the mitigating circumstances, so no burden of proof applies and Apprendi has no application.
The last penalty-phase claim concerned mitigating evidence. Longo had offered evidence of Mexican extradition law, that a fugitive may not be extradited unless the receiving state waives the death penalty, as part of his character. The court found that the facts of the arrest in Mexico had in fact reached the jury, since both Longo and an FBI agent had testified at length about it. The only item excluded was the law itself, and the court held that it did not bear on his character. The only link was an inference that, because he had never learned the law, he had not planned the murders. The court rejected that inference, because he had never looked into Mexican law after the murders either, although he had at least as much reason to do so and had nine days in which to act. The evidence therefore did not make any fact relating to premeditation more or less probable under OEC 401, and the trial court had properly excluded it.
After the direct review Longo sought post-conviction relief in the state courts, claiming that his lawyers at the capital trial had been inadequate and ineffective. In that proceeding the State moved to compel him to produce all documents relating to the capital murder case. He moved for a protective order to bar the State from disclosing confidential communications between himself and his trial lawyers to third parties, including for use in any future prosecution. The post-conviction court denied the motion.
On May 30, 2014, in Longo v. Premo (case S061072), the Oregon Supreme Court sitting en banc held that a writ of mandamus is an appropriate remedy where a post-conviction court had a duty to prevent disclosure of privileged communications. The legislature had codified the common-law lawyer-client privilege, which allows a client to refuse to disclose any confidential communication and to prevent others from disclosing it. The post-conviction court had therefore erred in denying the protective order. The disposition reads: "Peremptory write of mandamus to issue." The court thereby directed the post-conviction court to issue a protective order. The ruling concerned the protection of privileged material, not the validity of the convictions or the sentence.
While his case moved through the courts, the death sentence itself stopped meaning an execution date. Oregon had last carried out an execution in 1997. On November 22, 2011, Governor John Kitzhaber used his power of reprieve under the state constitution to halt an execution and declared: "I will not allow further executions while I am Governor." He chose not to commute the existing sentences, about 37 of them at the time, Longo's among them. When Kate Brown took office in 2015, she said the moratorium would continue.
In 2019 Brown signed Senate Bill 1013, which narrowed the crime of aggravated murder and removed future dangerousness, the second of the four questions Longo's jury had answered, from what a jury weighs in deciding on death.
On December 13, 2022, with less than a month left in her term, Governor Brown announced that she was commuting the sentences of all 17 people under sentence of death in Oregon. The order changed each sentence to life in prison without the possibility of parole and took effect the following day. The governor's list named Longo, then 48, seventh among the 17.
Brown called the death penalty "both dysfunctional and immoral." She said the commutations were not based on any rehabilitative efforts by the prisoners themselves, and that she hoped they would "bring us a significant step closer to finality in these cases."
Since December 14, 2022, Longo's sentence has been life in prison without the possibility of parole, to be served in Oregon state custody. His convictions on all seven counts were not affected by the commutation. No later ruling in his case, in state or federal court, has been reported since the Oregon Supreme Court's decision of May 30, 2014.
Longo pleaded guilty to the counts concerning his wife and the youngest child and denied the murders of the two older children, of which a jury found him guilty. The Oregon Supreme Court upheld those verdicts. No court has set any conviction aside.
December 2001: four members of his family die in Waldport, Oregon.
December 28, 2001: Lincoln County charges Longo with aggravated murder; a federal warrant charges unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.
January 11, 2002: the FBI adds him to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.
January 13, 2002: he is arrested in Mexico; he is returned to the United States the next day.
November 2002: the defense proposes a negotiated resolution; the State does not agree to drop the death penalty.
February 14, 2003: he pleads guilty to counts 1, 4 and 7 and not guilty to the other four.
February 18, 2003: jury selection begins in Lincoln County.
March 10, 2003: the trial on the four remaining counts is set to begin.
April 7, 2003: a jury convicts him on the other four counts.
2003: the jury recommends death and the trial judge imposes a sentence of death.
September 12, 2006: argument before the Oregon Supreme Court.
November 9, 2006: the Oregon Supreme Court affirms the convictions and the sentence of death.
November 22, 2011: Governor Kitzhaber grants a reprieve and announces that no further executions will take place in his term.
May 30, 2014: the Oregon Supreme Court orders a protective order in his post-conviction case.
2019: Senate Bill 1013 narrows aggravated murder and removes future dangerousness from the jury's considerations.
December 13, 2022: Governor Kate Brown announces the commutation of all 17 death sentences; it takes effect the next day.