Former county judge dies

He was the great gentleman of the court, a man who was humble enough to walk to work each day from his campus-area home, who was comfortable enough in his own skin to keep wearing a bow tie long after they went out of style.

Former Lane County Circuit Court Judge Douglas Spencer was also among the most highly respected judges in the court’s history and oversaw some of the most highly publicized cases of his era before his retirement in 1989.

Spencer, a Eugene native who was educated in the city’s public schools before obtaining both his bachelor’s and law school degrees at Harvard University, died at his home on Aug. 1 of cancer. He was 89.

“He treated lawyers and witnesses and all parties with respect,” retired Lane County Circuit Judge Pierre Van Rysselberghe, 79, said on Saturday. “Some judges become impatient and aren’t always courteous. But he cared. He cared about how people felt when they left his courtroom.”

Van Rysselberghe recalled meeting Spencer for the first time when Van Rysselberghe was a 12-year-old Boy Scout in 1946. Spencer had just returned home from his three years with the Navy during World War II and volunteered to help Eugene’s Troop 6 at Camp Lucky Boy near Blue River.

“He taught us how to put out a camp fire,” Van Rysselberghe recalled with amusement.

Among Spencer’s most high-profile cases during his 22 years on the bench, from 1967 to 1989, was the case of Michael Evan Feher, a 19-year-old former University of Oregon student who opened fire with two high-powered rifles at Autzen Stadium on Nov. 12, 1984.

Feher killed Olympic sprinter Chris Brathwaite, who was jogging nearby on Pre’s Trail, and also wounded a UO wrestler inside the stadium, before committing suicide.

At issue was whether Feher was covered by his parent’s insurance policy, which was obliged to defend a $1.5 million wrongful death lawsuit filed by Brathwaite’s widow, Sharon Brathwaite. Spencer found that Feher’s fatal wounding of Brathwaite didn’t fall under insurance policy exclusions for injuries “expected or intended by the insured,” according to a 1986 Register-Guard story.

“Accordingly, my decision is that the exclusions do not apply and the plaintiff has a duty to perform its insurance contracts in connection with the litigation described,” Spencer wrote.

Aetna appealed the decision, but the Oregon Court of Appeals upheld it in 1988.

In 1985, Spencer tried the first death penalty case in Lane County after Oregon voters reenacted capital punishment in 1984. Benny Lee Chaffin would be convicted of the kidnapping, rape and strangulation of a 9-year-old Springfield girl, but jurors were not unanimous during the death penalty phase, and Spencer sentenced Chaffin to life plus 30 years in prison.

Spencer was also the judge during the trial of Michael Dale Kell, a 20-year-old transient and one of three people convicted of plotting the murder of a Springfield mill worker who died after a bomb exploded beneath the seat of his car when he started the ignition in 1982.

Spencer was the son of attorney and UO law professor Carlton Spencer and Pauline Wheeler Spencer, and the grandson of Ernest Spencer, a Lane County commissioner in the 1920s. He was a 1941 graduate of Eugene’s University High School.

Upon graduating from Harvard Law School in 1949, Spencer served as a deputy district attorney for Lane County from 1949 to 1951 before going into private practice. Oregon Gov. Tom McCall appointed Spencer to the Lane County bench in 1967.

Kip Leonard, now a senior Lane County judge, was sworn in by Spencer as his replacement in October 1989. Leonard’s son, Nick, then 4, wore a bow tie for the occasion, according to a Register-Guard story that covered the event.

“He was a judge of great intelligence and great integrity,” Leonard said on Saturday. “And he had a great, subtle sense of humor.”

Spencer was part of a generation of smart, independent judges who “taught the rest of us how to be trial judges,” Leonard said.

U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken of Eugene, who was the county’s presiding District Court judge when Spencer retired in 1989, remembered how Spencer’s door “was always wide open, and he couldn’t be more willing to mentor and teach.

“What a gentleman,” she said. “He was very much respected and loved by all who served on that court.”

Spencer was preceded in death by his wife, schoolteacher Amy Lou Spencer, in 2003.

Survivors include two daughters, Susan Bettis of West Melbourne, Fla. and Helen Spencer-Snyder of Montclair, N.J.; a son, David Spencer of Snohomish, Wash.; and eight grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.

A memorial service will be held at 1 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 17, at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, 1300 Pearl St. in Eugene.