A Lane County judge declared a mistrial in a shooting case after prosecutors sat on evidence for 18 months and dumped dozens of files on the defense after trial was already underway — the third time this year the county's district attorney's office has been caught violating discovery rules in a violent crime case. When the state cheats to win, the only person who pays is the defendant, and the system that's supposed to protect the accused instead pads its conviction numbers by ambush.
Desmond Boris Washington, 40, was indicted in January 2025 on charges including attempted murder and assault with a firearm for a December 2024 shooting at City Nights, a downtown Eugene bar. His attorney, Willow Hillman, argued Washington acted in self-defense when he shot Elijah Collins Motley and Martez Mikel Lewis. He never got a fair chance to make that case.
According to court documents, Hillman and her team received at least 33 pieces of discovery from prosecutor Matthew Wojcik one week before trial and 23 more pieces after the trial was scheduled to begin — all of it allegedly in the prosecution's possession for a year and a half. Hillman says evidence is still missing, including text messages between a detective and witnesses, additional body camera footage, and a scientific evidence report. While she was drafting a motion to dismiss, she received photos from forensic testing and 225 pages of another report.
"The sheer volume of discovery that has come in since this trial commenced creates prejudice," Hillman wrote. Washington had already been waiting 18 months for his trial, which had been postponed twice. "He is being denied due process and a fair trial simply by the state providing a volume of discovery that cannot properly be analyzed in this short amount of time."
Lane County Circuit Court Judge Jay McAlpin denied the motion to dismiss but acknowledged the problem. "The sheer volume of material disclosed late makes it impossible to identify every item discovered in the last two weeks, much less evaluate them," McAlpin wrote. He noted that numerous continuances, mistrials, and dismissed cases in the last five years can be attributed to prosecution error, and that it is incumbent on the state to find and disclose everything it might use in court — a shared obligation between the DA's office and Eugene Police.
This is the third mistrial in Lane County this year from a discovery violation, and the second in two weeks in a violent crime case before McAlpin with Hillman representing the defense. The Register-Guard reported the pattern; the other three outlets in the daily cycle ignored it entirely, focusing instead on a Massachusetts judge restricting broadcast of autopsy photos and a 911 call in the Lindsay Clancy murder trial. That case involves its own questions about what the public is allowed to see, but the contrast is telling: when a father asks a court to shield graphic images of his dead children from television cameras, the judiciary obliges; when prosecutors withhold evidence from a man fighting for his freedom, the judiciary calls it unintentional and schedules another trial.
McAlpin's order requires a new trial to be rescheduled within two weeks. No indication yet whether anyone in the DA's office will face disciplinary action for the violation. The question isn't whether the system is broken — it's whether anyone with the power to fix it cares enough to try.
