Background
Lynn Edward Benton was charged with murder for allegedly conspiring with two individuals—Campbell and her son Jaynes—to kill his wife, DB, who was killed on May 28, 2011. A key witness was Smith, a coworker of Jaynes at a Chevron gas station. Smith initially confirmed to detectives that Jaynes had not left work that day, but after multiple police interviews and polygraph examinations using suggestive tactics, he changed his account several times—at one point claiming Jaynes had left work twice during the murder window. By 2015 and again in 2016 hearing testimony, Smith said he could not remember whether Jaynes had left work. At a 2025 meeting with the state’s investigator ahead of retrial, Smith stated he remembered that Jaynes had left during his shift, though he recalled no further details.
Benton’s convictions from a 2016 trial had been reversed by the Oregon Supreme Court due to an unrelated suppression error. State v. Benton, 371 Or 311 (2023). In advance of retrial, Benton filed a pretrial motion to exclude Smith’s testimony that Jaynes left work on the day of the murder. Benton argued that suggestive police interrogation, polygraph use, ADHD, trauma, and other stressors had so contaminated Smith’s memory of that specific fact that he was not competent under OEC 601 and lacked personal knowledge under OEC 602. The trial court granted the motion, finding Smith generally competent but specifically incompetent to testify about Jaynes’s whereabouts, concluding his memory of that fact had been “destroyed.”
The state took a direct interlocutory appeal to the Oregon Supreme Court under ORS 138.045(1)(d) and (2), which authorizes the state to appeal pretrial suppression orders in murder cases directly to the Supreme Court.
The Court’s Holding
The Oregon Supreme Court, in an opinion by Chief Justice Flynn, reversed the circuit court’s order. The court held that OEC 601—Oregon’s general witness-competency rule—governs only whether a person possesses the general capacities to perceive, recollect, and communicate sufficient to qualify as a witness at all. It does not authorize a court to bar an otherwise competent witness from testifying about a particular fact because the witness’s memory of that specific fact is allegedly contaminated or destroyed. The court found the trial court applied the wrong legal standard by conducting a fact-specific competency inquiry under OEC 601.
The court drew a sharp textual and structural distinction between OEC 601 and OEC 602. OEC 601 asks whether a person has the general capacity to “be a witness at all.” OEC 602, by contrast, addresses whether a witness may testify “to a matter” by requiring sufficient evidence of personal knowledge of that specific matter—and that determination involves conditional relevance questions appropriate for juries, not a gatekeeping ruling that categorically excludes the testimony. The court reaffirmed that concerns about memory quality, suggestive interrogation, and the reliability of particular recollections go to credibility and admissibility under other evidence rules (such as OEC 402, 403, 602, or 701), not to competency under OEC 601.
The court remanded for further proceedings, expressly declining to reach Benton’s arguments under OEC 401, 402, 403, 602, and 701—rules the trial court had not addressed—leaving those challenges available on remand.
Key Takeaways
- OEC 601 competency is a threshold, all-or-nothing determination about whether a person has the general capacity to perceive, recollect, and communicate—not a rule for excluding testimony on a specific topic or fact.
- A trial court cannot use OEC 601 to find a witness “competent generally but incompetent as to a particular matter”; such fact-specific memory challenges belong under OEC 602 (personal knowledge), OEC 403 (prejudice/confusion), OEC 701 (lay opinion), or related rules.
- Oregon’s liberal competency standard, rooted in the policy of sending credibility questions to the jury rather than resolving them as admissibility rulings, remains intact; memory contamination from suggestive police procedures does not render a witness categorically incompetent.
- The court distinguished its earlier decisions in Milbradt and Sarich—both of which involved witnesses with pervasive cognitive or communicative limitations—as confirming that OEC 601 targets general incapacity, not specific-fact memory gaps.
Why It Matters
This decision clarifies a recurring source of confusion in Oregon trial courts about the boundary between witness competency (OEC 601) and personal knowledge (OEC 602). Defense attorneys in criminal cases—particularly those involving allegations of suggestive interrogation or memory contamination—have increasingly argued that OEC 601’s competency framework can be used to surgically exclude damaging testimony on a fact-by-fact basis. The court firmly closes that door: the proper vehicle for attacking the reliability of a particular recollection is OEC 602, OEC 403, or the framework developed in State v. Lawson/James, 352 Or 724 (2012), not a competency ruling that effectively removes the witness’s testimony from jury consideration entirely.
For prosecutors, the ruling preserves the ability to put before the jury witnesses whose memory is imperfect or has a complicated history, while leaving defendants free to attack the weight and credibility of that testimony through cross-examination and expert witnesses on memory science. The decision also serves as a reminder that interlocutory suppression appeals in Oregon murder cases go directly to the Supreme Court—a procedural posture that gave this evidentiary question immediate statewide resolution before a second murder trial could proceed.