By Jeff Lehr
jlehr@joplinglobe.com
If a Jasper County jury threw the book at Joseph W. Mort six weeks ago, the judge hit him with a second volume Friday.
The 51-year-old Mort was assessed two life sentences by a jury that found him guilty Sept. 1 of two counts of first-degree statutory sodomy. The rural Webb City man went to his sentencing hearing Friday in Jasper County Circuit Court in Joplin hoping to get those life terms reduced by Circuit Judge David Mouton, the presiding judge at his trial.
Instead, Mouton upheld the jury’s decision that Mort should spend the remainder of his life in prison for sexually abusing a girl three years ago when she was 9 years old, and ordered that the two life terms run consecutively. The judge had the choice of making the sentences concurrent or consecutive.
“I find that the jury verdict and the assessments on counts one and two are within the prescribed range and that neither are excessive,” Mouton told the defendant prior to pronouncing sentence.
First-degree statutory sodomy carries from 10 to 30 years, or up to life, in prison in Missouri.
Defense attorney Keith Pennick filed three motions for the judge to consider following his client’s convictions by jury.
Pennick argued at the hearing with respect to his motion for an acquittal that the girl had given three significantly varying accounts of the abuse during two interviews conducted at the Children’s Center in Joplin and during her testimony at trial.
Pennick also filed motions for a new trial and for a reduction of sentence. The judge overruled all three motions at the hearing.
The victim testified at trial that Mort abused her on multiple occasions and that the abuse frequently took the form of oral sex acts that he performed while she was in bed asleep. She also described an occasion when Mort and an adult friend, Chad Elliott, had her and another girl pull down their underwear so the men could touch them.
Trial testimony showed that Mort was not charged following the girl’s first interview at the Children’s Center. Her second interview was occasioned by new information obtained by investigators from disclosures of the second girl involved in the incident with both Mort and Elliott, and of a third girl. Those disclosures concerned Elliott’s abuse of all three girls.
It was only after Elliott was charged in the fall of 2006, and after further investigation, that Mort was charged in 2007.
But Elliott managed to receive a considerably lighter sentence through a plea agreement with the Jasper County prosecutor’s office. He pleaded guilty last year to three counts of statutory sodomy and was assessed a seven-year prison term.
