Oregon man with 166 arrests gets life sentence after flashing Washington Square mall employee

A Salem man has been given a life sentence in a public-indecency and theft case, the Washington County District Attorney’s Office said.

Joshua Cory Nealy, 41, received the sentence on May 7 under an Oregon law that makes life without the possibility of parole the “presumptive sentence” for a defendant who has been convicted at least twice before of felony sex crimes.

Nealy was convicted of attempted rape in 2007 and public indecency in 2018. He has a long record of arrests and convictions that goes back more than 20 years, including pleading guilty in 2010 to failure to report as a sex offender, according to available court documents. Prosecutors said he had been arrested 166 times.

The life sentence comes from a 2023 case in Washington County. Nealy took off his clothes in a dressing room at a Washington Square mall clothing store and then exposed himself to a woman who worked there, the district attorney’s office said in a statement.

“He asked if she wanted to have sex and invited her into the dressing room,” the district attorney’s office said.

The woman called for a store security officer, and Nealy exposed himself to the officer before dressing and leaving the store with a pair of stolen sunglasses, according to the statement.

Before Washington County Circuit Judge Theodore Sims handed down the sentence, Nealy’s lawyers argued that life in prison would be “inappropriate” in this case and claimed that Nealy had a “compromised mental state,” pointing to police reports from his 2007 attempted-rape conviction that indicated “he was using ‘crank,’ had been awake for two days and expressed his belief that his mother was the Queen of Southern England.” The defense’s sentencing memo stated that during the 2018 incident leading to his first public-indecency conviction he was talking gibberish the whole time.

The memorandum also argued that in the 2023 public-indecency and theft case he “appeared under the influence” during the incident.

Court records show that Nealy also has two separate open cases in Washington County, one for assault and the other for attempted assault.