She Objected. The Judgment Said No One Had.

LA GRANDE, Ore. — Here's the short version. When an Oregon court decides whether to put an adult under a guardianship, it sends a visitor to meet that person and ask, among other things, whether they object. In five Baker County cases, the visitor wrote down that someone did. In every one, the judgment that followed, drafted by the same attorney and signed by the same judge, told the court that no objections had been made or filed. Nobody got a hearing on those objections before the appointments. One of them died before the court appointed her a lawyer. I filed a complaint with the Oregon State Bar on September 10. Four days later the Bar said it was too early to decide, and a month after that it described its own decision differently. The final word now belongs to the Bar's general counsel.

The attorney is Darcy Arriola Kindschy of Intermountain Law in Baker City. The judge is Matthew B. Shirtcliff. Nearly everything below comes from their own filings and the court's own file.

Jayne Colleen Peters told the court's visitor she didn't want a guardian.

The visitor was Gregory L. Baxter, a retired Baker County judge. He met her in a hospital emergency room in January 2024. His report recorded that she wanted a lawyer and was willing to come to a hearing. On the form, next to the question "Does the Respondent object to the appointment of a fiduciary?" he marked yes. In his own words: "Respondent was adamant that she did not want a guardian."

The same report described dementia, and Baxter recommended a guardian. Both things are true at once, and the law has a way to handle that. A person facing guardianship in Oregon can object out loud, to the visitor, and when an objection is presented the court holds a hearing. A judge listens, and then decides.

Kindschy's billing records show her office reviewed the report the day it was filed. Seventeen days later, Shirtcliff signed the judgment Kindschy submitted. It appointed a permanent guardian and conservator over Jayne, with power over her health care and her property. It said "no objections have been made or filed in this proceeding." There was no hearing.

Jayne died on April 7, 2024. On April 11, the court appointed a lawyer to represent her.

Jayne had a twin sister, Jean Ileen McSherry. Baxter visited her too, and her report reads the same way: she didn't want a guardian, and he marked yes to the objection question. Her judgment was signed February 5, 2024, the same day as Jayne's, with the same sentence. No objections had been made or filed.

Four months later, Kindschy described Jean's position differently. In a sworn declaration in June 2024, she wrote that Jean's "general oral objection needs to be heard to determine the propriety of the protective proceeding and appointed fiduciary." The court heard it on June 20. The amended judgment signed the next day recognized "the general oral objection of Jean Ileen McSherry expressed to the Visitor." The guardianship continued. By then Jean's guardian and conservator had held permanent authority over her for more than four months, under a judgment that said she'd never objected at all.

Douglas Bennett Williams was the third case Baxter reported on that same week in January 2024. Baxter met him at his duplex and asked whether he objected to his sisters becoming his guardians. Williams struggled with the question. "Finally, he blurted out that he objected," Baxter wrote. He marked yes on the form. Williams said if anyone was appointed he wanted his former wife.

On February 1, Shirtcliff appointed the sisters. The judgment Kindschy submitted said no objections had been made or filed. Williams's own written objection, on a form Kindschy's office prepared, is signed and dated January 18, 2024. The court didn't file-stamp it until March 4. The record doesn't show who held that signed form in between. He got a hearing in March, and in June, through counsel, he withdrew his objection and agreed to let his sisters keep serving. His position changed. The appointment had already been made under a judgment calling the case unopposed.

In James Clyde Huff's case, in 2025, the objection came from his son, not from Huff himself. The visitor's report marked yes to whether anyone else objected, and recorded that "Blake Huff objects to the petition." Kindschy's office billed for reviewing that report the day it was filed. On March 3, 2025, the day she signed the certificate saying no objection had been served on her, her office billed an hour and thirty-six minutes for a "Phone call to Clerk re Objections filed." The judgment saying no objections had been made or filed was signed the next morning.

Reva Young's case is the most recent. In February 2026, a different visitor, Marita Somerville, asked whether Young wanted her son to take over as her guardian and conservator. Young wanted her grandson. Somerville wrote that she said so six times. "I love [Gaylon] but I don't want him in charge of my care," the report quotes her. Asked if she wanted him managing her money, she said no.

Kindschy's ledger shows her reviewing that report. The court appointed a lawyer for Young three days later. On March 7, Kindschy certified that no objection had been received, and on March 9 the judgment appointing the son said no objections had been made or filed. In August, Young's own court-appointed lawyer asked to withdraw. In his motion he wrote that he'd been appointed "for the purpose of representing Protected Person in navigating the objection filed through the Court Visitor Report on February 22, 2026," and that "the parties have resolved the objection without a hearing."

The court, the visitor and the lawyer appointed to handle it all called it an objection. The judgment didn't.

I wanted to know whether "no objections have been made or filed" was simply the form Kindschy always used. So I pulled her other protective cases in Baker and Union counties, twelve more, filed between May 2024 and March 2026.

In six of them the visitor recorded no objection, and the sentence was true. One was dismissed before any final judgment. In one, the man didn't object but told the visitor he'd prefer a different guardian, and the sentence was used. In the other four, an objection was filed with the court and fought out, and in every one of those her judgment said so. One reads "following contested hearing upon the Objection of Carol Ann Gutridge held December 6, 2024." Another says "no unresolved objections having been received." Another names the objector, the hearing and the withdrawal.

Wherever an objection was filed, the sentence changed. The sentence saying there were none shows up where the objection lived in the visitor's report and nowhere else.

The people in these five cases weren't in a position to complain about any of this. So I did.

I filed my complaint against Kindschy with the Oregon State Bar on September 10, with forty-six exhibits: the visitor reports, the judgments, the certificates and her own billing records. It also raised what happened in Jayne's file after she died, and petitions that asked the court to waive a conservator's bond without stating what the estate was worth.

The Bar's intake office answered at 4:24 on Monday morning, September 14. Assistant General Counsel Linda L. Kruschke wrote that the Bar is not a court empowered to resolve the "key issues" in the controversies I described. "Until those key issues are resolved, it is premature for us to make a decision whether misconduct may have occurred," she wrote.

It didn't say which issue, in which case, a court would have to decide. Nobody had asked a court to undo these judgments, and my complaint said so. The question was what the lawyer told the court, and what she knew when she told it. No probate judge is ever going to be asked that.

On September 21 I asked the Bar's general counsel to review the dismissal. I sent the Young lawyer's own words, the Huff clerk call, and the twelve other cases showing how Kindschy writes the sentence when an objection reaches the court.

On October 5 the Bar forwarded my request to Kindschy, with me blind-copied. The letter told her, "As you know, we dismissed this matter because we did not find a sufficient basis to support a reasonable belief that any ethical violation had occurred."

That isn't what the September 14 decision said. It said it was too early to decide, and it used the rule's actual standard, whether misconduct may have occurred. On October 7 I wrote to the general counsel to put that in the file, because the rules let the general counsel affirm a dismissal simply by adopting the intake office's reasoning. The file now holds two different versions of that reasoning.

Kindschy has until October 26 to respond if she chooses. Then the general counsel decides on the record. That decision is final.

Baker County is a small courthouse. Baxter, the visitor in four of the five cases, held the judicial seat Shirtcliff took over in 2019. Shirtcliff came to it from the district attorney's office, and Baxter's son became district attorney the following month. Those are the roles the public record shows. It doesn't show the district attorney taking part in these guardianships, and I'm not saying he did.

What the record does show is Jayne's file.

In January the court's visitor wrote that she objected, wanted a lawyer, and was willing to come to a hearing. In February the court gave someone else permanent control of her care and her property and declared that nobody had objected. Kindschy's ledger shows her office, the day after Jayne died, researching how to wind up the case. On April 9, two days after her death, a conservator's abstract concerning real property was signed by her conservator, who signed as conservator for both Jayne and Jean. It was recorded the next day.

The order appointing Jayne's lawyer is dated April 11. Her death certificate says April 7.

How I reported this. I filed the complaint described here, as a licensed Oregon private investigator, so I'm the complainant as well as the reporter. The story rests on the court files in the five cases (visitor reports, judgments, certificates, petitions and later filings), Intermountain Law's billing records, twelve more of Kindschy's Baker and Union County protective cases, and my correspondence with the Oregon State Bar. Nobody pays me for this work, and I don't represent anyone in these cases.