Lane County seeks dismissal of ex-photographer’s child porn conviction after ruling

Lane County prosecutors moved to dismiss the conviction of Randall DeWitt Simons after the Oregon Supreme Court ruled that key evidence from the Oakridge case had been gathered without a warrant and could not stand in court.

Simons, 73, was transferred from Oregon state prison back to the Lane County Jail this week, and a local judge signed off on the dismissal on April 15. He had been serving a 10-year sentence for 15 counts of first-degree encouraging child sexual abuse after a 2019 conviction tied to downloads made at an A&W restaurant in Oakridge, across from his apartment.

The legal turn came on March 26, when the Oregon Supreme Court decided State v. Simons, the Lane County case known as CC 19CR43543 and Supreme Court case SC S070787. The justices reversed part of a 2023 Oregon Court of Appeals ruling and sent the case back for further proceedings, holding that a person keeps a privacy interest in internet browsing activity even on a public Wi-Fi network. The court also said acknowledging terms of service did not erase that privacy right under Article I, section 9, of the Oregon Constitution.

That ruling undercut the evidence used at trial. Lane County District Attorney Chris Parosa then asked the court to dismiss the indictment, saying the case could not be proven beyond a reasonable doubt without the suppressed internet-history evidence. The decision places the case squarely in the category of a constitutional and evidentiary failure, not a new factual dispute about what happened in Oakridge.

The case has drawn attention well beyond Lane County because Simons was previously identified as a photographer who once worked for JonBenét Ramsey. But for local prosecutors and judges, the immediate issue was narrower and more consequential: whether a conviction built on warrantless access to browsing data could survive once the state’s highest court ruled that data was protected.

For Lane County, the dismissal closes a prosecution that had already produced a prison sentence, but it also shows how a search-and-seizure ruling can unwind a final conviction years later. The transfer from prison to the county jail and the judge’s approval of dismissal made clear that the case had shifted from punishment to reversal, with the outcome driven by the lawfulness of the evidence itself.