Skip to main content
The first time Portland police arrested William Stevenson for dealing hard drugs downtown, last August, he was riding a stolen moped through a homeless encampment with 13 grams of cocaine.
By the fifth time, frustrations boiled over. “Stevenson has been found with almost $10,000 in cash and drugs within the last month,” prosecutor Chidimma Mgbadigha wrote in March. Stevenson posted $100 bail and was released. Two months later, he was arrested again.
In nine months, police have arrested Stevenson six times for dealing and possession of hard drugs, often downtown near Washington Center, the boarded-up office complex at Southwest 4th Avenue and Washington Street. In that time, Stevenson has spent a total of nine nights in jail.
He is, according to the police squad that patrols downtown, cites drug users and arrests their dealers, among the most frequently caught pushers of opioids that have turned blocks of the city into a dystopia. Yet he is routinely released to ply his trade within hours of his arrest.
“He’s received the message that he can just keep doing this,” says Portland Bike Squad Officer Eli Arnold. “The public does not understand how hard it is to be held in jail.”
Oregon has decriminalized the possession of small amounts of hard drugs. That’s a decision some voters have come to regret—and elected officials have begun to claw back, recently criminalizing even tiny amounts of fentanyl.
As advocates for the new policy quickly point out, Oregon never legalized the selling of those drugs. Yet drug dealing is now done with such impunity on the streets of downtown Portland that it is possible to walk up and film the transactions.
WW talked to police, prosecutors and court officials to understand how Stevenson has been allowed to continue flouting the law so openly and so frequently.
No one wants to claim responsibility, but Stevenson’s freedom to reoffend stems from years of choices made by elected officials. Reformers, including Multnomah County District Attorney Mike Schmidt, successfully fought to reduce the use of bail, which they say is ineffective and discriminatory. The result was a new bail reform law passed last year that has allowed Stevenson to walk out of jail by paying less.
He regularly failed to appear in court, yet judges declined to set higher bail amounts requested by prosecutors. Meanwhile, DA’s office delays and a shortage of public defenders mean he has yet to face trial or accept a plea deal on any charges in Multnomah County.
Stevenson declined to discuss his case through his attorney. He has pleaded not guilty.
The fact that none of Stevenson’s alleged crimes was violent worked in his favor. Judges and court guidelines take into account whether defendants are a danger to the community when determining whether to hold them in jail and under what conditions.
But this policy has consequences, says Eric Pickard, the prosecutor recently assigned to Stevenson’s case. “Did he hurt anybody directly? No,” Pickard says. But, he points out, drug dealing has fueled property crimes like car theft and shoplifting, as well as deadly overdoses.
Pickard spent an afternoon with a WW reporter poring over Stevenson’s file and concluded that the decisions made by prosecutors and court officials were reasonable.
Still: “I can say this,” he added. “Something different should happen if he’s actually going to be deterred from continuing to do this.”
Stevenson, 26, grew up in Mississippi and arrived in Portland four years ago from Texas. He has told officials that he previously worked in construction and as a dancer at strip clubs.
But sometime last year he was laid off from his carpentry job, court documents say, and began living on the streets, sometimes in a tent near Moda Center and sometimes staying at a Motel 6. Eventually, his attorney told a judge, he moved into his girlfriend’s apartment.
Meanwhile, he was feeding a cocaine and fentanyl habit, according to court documents. And he wasn’t just using these drugs, police say, he was selling them.
Last August, he was caught sitting on a stolen moped with a bag of cocaine. Two months later, he was spotted on TriMet security footage trading pinches of a substance for cash at a downtown bus stop—twice, on two consecutive days. Police chased him down and found more than $2,000 in cash in his pockets. “I don’t deal that much,” he told them. “Just trying to get by.”
In February, he was arrested, again, with cocaine and a gun. Prosecutors say he had blue-tipped bullets, designed to pierce body armor. The next month he was caught selling “blues”—fentanyl pills—outside Washington Center.
Stevenson has been open with law enforcement about his business practices. After being spotted approaching a black late-model car with a stack of bills, he told Officer Eli Arnold that he was purchasing counterfeit oxycodone pills from a “pair of Honduran men” for a little over a buck each and selling them for two.
He was arrested with $2,000 worth of those pills in his pockets. Arnold caught Stevenson dealing twice more near the same spot, once carrying $3,000 in cash.
Arnold came to this conclusion: “He’s stupid—and just not worried about getting in trouble.”
Each time Stevenson was caught by police, he was quickly released. His longest stint in jail was three days in February.
Part of the reason is Senate Bill 48, the 2021 bail reform act that required courts to adopt statewide guidelines last year determining under what circumstances a defendant could be held in jail.
The first few times Stevenson was arrested for drug crimes, the guidelines determined he should be released due to, among many factors, his lack of criminal history. After Stevenson’s fourth arrest, in March, Circuit Judge Jenna Plank ordered him to report to supervision—a decision still a step below setting bail.
Drugs were “wreaking havoc” on his life, she noted. And despite the fact that Stevenson had so far racked up four failures to appear in court, he was “doing a good job of making all your court dates,” she said.
When Stevenson was caught a little over a week later with pills, powder and $400 at the drug market downtown, prosecutors were fed up. They asked Plank to set bail at $75,000.
But Stevenson had finally been assigned a public defender, Katherine Stanford, who put up a vigorous defense. The request was unconstitutional, she said. “Consider his indigency,” she told Plank.
Plank settled on $1,000. Turning to Stevenson, she said: “I just want you to have a little skin in the game.”
His girlfriend paid the required one-tenth security, $100, and Stevenson walked out the door that afternoon.
Over the next three months, judges would set Stevenson’s bail between the amounts of $1,000 and $4,000—all over prosecutors’ objections that the amounts were too low.
Bail cannot be punitive. It is meant to motivate defendants, who are innocent until convicted, to appear in court. But by this measure, it was not effective. Stevenson failed to make two more court appearances in March. And although he has recently begun reliably making court appearances, presumably at the advice of his newly assigned attorney, he has continued to be arrested dealing drugs downtown. Five cases are still pending against him.
The Multnomah County Circuit Court’s chief criminal judge, Cheryl Albrecht, acknowledges to WW that aspects of Stevenson’s journey through the court system are “problematic.”
“He’s picking up a new case while he’s on release for three other cases,” she says. “People would consider that poor policy; that’s not what we want to see happen.”
But she doesn’t believe higher bail is necessarily the solution. “Bail is not the most effective way to get people to court,” she explains. “That’s why it’s come under fire.”
SB 48 eliminated the standardized “schedule” that tied predetermined bail amounts to specific charges, $5,000 for low-level felonies like Stevenson’s, and instead left it up to judges’ discretion. DA Schmidt, a reform-minded prosecutor, has lobbied for the change.
“I don’t believe how much money you have in your wallet should determine whether or not you get held in jail,” he tells WW, noting that the court, with input from his office, is reviewing and adjusting the new release guidelines. “We’re going to continue to make tweaks on the fly,” Schmidt added.
As Stevenson’s charges have piled up, so have the potential consequences.
In early May, Stevenson was indicted on charges of selling more than 100 grams of fentanyl, which is considered a “super, super substantial” amount. If convicted of this latest charge, he faces a mandatory sentence of nearly five years in prison.
“A judge cannot deviate from that,” Pickard notes.