“If we could have put a solid felony case together against Mr. Hanna, and we tried, we would have gone forward with much stiffer charges… I would have liked to seen felony charges, but at the end of the day, this was the best we could do.”
— Sgt. Todd Davis, Portland Police Bureau
Many people in the community are outraged at the light sentence given to prominent local business man and owner of Mt. Hood Ski Bowl Kirk Hanna for the drunken, 80 mph, hit-and-run he pleaded guilty to last week.
Like any high-profile case like this, there are a lot of moving parts at work; the District Attorney’s office, the judge, the defense attorneys, the victim, the police, the defendant, and so on. I’ll be looking into the story a bit more in the coming days, but one thing I wanted to share now is the role that the Portland Police Bureau Traffic Division played (the Traffic Division handles all our city’s hit-and-run cases).
