Background
Cameron Stiles was convicted in Multnomah County Circuit Court of fleeing or attempting to elude a police officer (ORS 811.540(1)(b)(A)) and reckless driving following a traffic stop gone wrong. When officers pulled Stiles over, they placed a “stop-stick” — a tire-deflation device — beneath his rear tire as a precaution. After being explicitly told he was not free to leave and warned of additional charges if he drove off, Stiles pulled away over the stop-stick (which failed to deflate his tires) and fled.
Officers followed Stiles at or near the speed limit without activating lights or sirens, deliberately avoiding a formal traffic “pursuit” as defined by their protocols. After a few blocks, an officer attempted a PIT maneuver (a technique to spin and stop a fleeing vehicle). Stiles accelerated out of it, struck two parked cars and a pile of bark dust, and continued fleeing until a second PIT maneuver successfully stopped him.
On appeal, Stiles raised two assignments of error: (1) the trial court should have granted his motion for judgment of acquittal because the officers never formally “pursued” him, and (2) the jury instruction on the eluding charge was defective for failing to require the jury to find he knowingly fled a pursuing officer.
The Court’s Holding
The Court of Appeals affirmed both convictions. On the sufficiency-of-evidence claim, the court applied the standard from State v. Cunningham, 320 Or 47 (1994), viewing facts in the light most favorable to the state. The court held that even accepting Stiles’s narrow reading of “pursue,” a rational factfinder could find the eluding element satisfied: driving over the stop-stick after being ordered to stay, and then accelerating out of a PIT maneuver, were sufficient acts of fleeing or attempting to elude — regardless of whether officers formally activated lights and sirens.
On the jury instruction challenge, the court rejected the claim on two independent grounds. First, Stiles failed to preserve the objection: he did not object to the instruction when proposed, did not raise a concern when the trial court asked him to review the printed instruction, and took no exception after the instructions were read to the jury. The court also declined plain-error review because the parties’ competing arguments over how to read the instructions as a whole demonstrated the issue was “reasonably in dispute” — foreclosing the “obvious error” finding required under State v. Vanornum, 354 Or 614 (2013).
Second, the court stated that even if plain-error requirements had been met, it would decline to exercise its discretion to correct the error, because a timely objection could have easily cured any defect in the instruction. The court cited State v. Dowd, 342 Or App 57 (2025), and State v. Wiltse, 373 Or 1 (2024), for the principle that unpreserved instructional errors rarely warrant reversal.
Key Takeaways
- A defendant can be found guilty of fleeing or attempting to elude a police officer under ORS 811.540(1)(b)(A) even if officers never activated lights or sirens and did not engage a formal vehicular pursuit — acts such as driving over a stop-stick or accelerating out of a PIT maneuver after being ordered to stay can independently support the conviction.
- Failure to object to a jury instruction at trial — including failing to raise the issue when given an opportunity to review the written instruction — forfeits the claim on appeal and will not be rescued by plain-error review when the legal point is reasonably in dispute.
- Even where plain-error review might otherwise apply, Oregon appellate courts will decline to exercise discretion to correct an instructional error that the defendant could have prevented with a simple, timely objection at trial.
Why It Matters
This nonprecedential decision reinforces that the “pursuing police officer” element of Oregon’s eluding statute does not require proof of a formal, protocol-defined vehicular chase. Prosecutors can point to a defendant’s affirmative resistance to lawful detention — such as driving over a stop-stick or countering a PIT maneuver — as evidence of eluding even where officers intentionally kept their response low-key. Defense counsel should not assume that the absence of lights-and-sirens pursuit will defeat an eluding charge.
The opinion also serves as a reminder of Oregon’s strict preservation rules. Appellate courts will not reach instructional-error arguments that were never raised below, and the mere fact that an issue is debatable on the merits prevents it from qualifying as “plain error.” Defense attorneys must articulate specific objections to jury instructions on the record — including after the court reads them to the jury — or risk forfeiting the claim entirely.