Michigan Criminal Lawyers Blog

In July of 2012, Melvin Morse, a 61-year-old former pediatrician, was charged with endangerment and assault after the daughter of his girlfriend ran away, accusing Morse of water boarding and other abuse. He was found guilty of the charges against him in February 2014, and sentenced to three years in prison. Now Morse, who has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Larry King Live, is appealing his conviction according to news reports at NBC News and U.S. News & World Report.

At the time of the alleged water boarding incident, Morse was 58 years old. In all, Morse was convicted of felony reckless endangerment and five misdemeanors. On Wednesday, May 6 it was announced that Morse would appeal his conviction on several grounds. One issue, according to Morse’s defense attorney Joseph Hurley, was the fact that a judge in the case allowed jurors to review videotapes of statements given by the alleged victim and her younger sister during deliberations – statements that were unsworn. Hurley claims that a prosecutor in the case encouraged jurors during her closing arguments to request permission from the judge to review the tapes if jurors felt it would help them in deliberations. However, the evidence challenging statements made by the girls in the videotapes the defense had in its possession was never made available to jurors.

Hurley also argued to the three-justice panel at the Delaware Supreme Court that the judge in the case erred when he allowed jurors to consider evidence of additional “bad acts” for which his client was not charged. Ultimately, Hurley felt that jurors were inflamed and Morse unfairly prejudiced because of the cumulative evidence.

On Wednesday, April 22, Barry Bonds only conviction in a performance-enhancing drug case going back to 2003 was overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, according to a recent news article at the New York Times. Bonds was convicted of obstruction of justice in 2011 after he gave what was called a “rambling, non-responsive answer to a simple question” during a grand jury proceeding. The point in question was whether Bonds had used performance-enhancing drugs during his baseball career, an allegation that has been made against several athletes including Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez, and Mark McGwire.

According to the article, Bonds was put at the center of baseball’s doping debate because of his involvement in the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative scandal. While he never failed a performance-enhancing drug test for the use of steroids administered by Major League Baseball since the testing began in 2003, he was thought to be guilty by a large majority of the public. This public opinion was spurred mostly by books and news media reports that made “strong cases” that Bonds had used steroid drugs to enhance his performance on the field, although he has never admitted to it.

Ultimately, all efforts to link Bonds legally to the sports’ doping saga have failed. The opinion of the appeals court stated that “Because there is insufficient evidence that Statement C (the “rambling, non-responsive answer” mentioned above) was material, defendant’s conviction for obstruction of justice in violation of 18 U.S.C. 1503 is not supported by the record. Whatever section 1503’s scope may be in other circumstances, defendant’s conviction here must be reversed.”