By Jeff Lehr

jlehr@joplinglobe.com

Theodore Ginnery will remain locked up. Indefinitely.

A Jasper County jury deliberated 11 minutes Thursday before returning a verdict that the 62-year-old convict is a sexually violent predator who should remain in the control, care and treatment of the Missouri Department of Mental Health, even though he has completed 28 years of prison sentences for two child-sex offenses perpetrated in the late 1970s in Joplin.

Ginnery’s age and health were the primary issues in the three-day trial to determine whether he fit a law pertaining to sexually violent predators under which the state attorney general’s office may seek civil commitments of certain prisoners past the completion dates of their criminal sentences.

Randy Schlegel, an attorney from the state public defender’s office representing Ginnery, told jurors during closing arguments Thursday that they were deciding “a case in which the essential facts are all numbers.”

The law requires the state to show that a prisoner has “a mental abnormality” that causes them “serious difficulty in controlling their behavior” and making them “more likely than not” to commit another offense if released.

The state’s expert witness, Springfield psychologist Kent Franks, testified Wednesday that he had diagnosed Ginnery with both a personality disorder and the umbrella sexual disorder of paraphilia. Franks scored Ginnery at moderately high and high risks to re-offend on two widely used risk-assessment scales for sex offenders.

One of the scales put Ginnery at what Franks termed “about a 50 percent risk of re-offense over 15 years.” The state’s witness added that he would place the risk significantly greater than 50 percent in Ginnery’s case when 10 to 15 other risk factors, not taken into account by either assessment tool, were considered, such as his failure to complete a sex-offender treatment program five years ago, a perceived “intimacy deficit,” problems with anger, and his separation from parents at birth.

Schlegel argued that the state’s expert was stacking purported risk factors that all existing studies of sex-offender recidivism among males his client’s age suggest have generally small correlation, if any, to actual re-offense rates. Schlegel had questioned witnesses about a study of seven or eight males over 60 years of age, none of whom re-offended when released. Another study showed just a 3.8 percent rate of recidivism and a third just 4.8 percent, jurors had heard during testimony Wednesday.

“These studies represent the best information we have about what really happens when we release these guys,” Schlegel reminded jurors during closing arguments.

None of the studies provides a rate that appears to meet the “more likely than not” criterion in the law since it should be presumed that standard means greater than a 50 percent chance, he argued.

Testimony revealed that Ginnery was convicted of three child-sex offenses, the two in Joplin and one in California, within a four-year period in the 1970s when he was in his 20s.

People change as they get older, Schlegel argued, particularly if they are in poor health, as his client is. Ginnery was living on disability benefits because of heart problems before he went to prison, and in 2005 underwent triple-bypass heart surgery. His heart condition and hypertension, diabetes and other ailments have all lessened his sex drive and make him less likely to re-offend, Schlegel said.

Terry Gross, assistant attorney general, countered that Ginnery was “totally disabled” when he molested a 12-year-old girl in California and when he had deviate sexual intercourse with a 10-year-old girl and a sexual relationship with a 13-year-old girl in Joplin. He remained so when he was caught cupping the breast of the daughter of a friend who was visiting him at prison in the 1980s and later wrote an inappropriate “love letter” to a female corrections officer, Gross said.





Civil commitment

Circuit Judge David Mouton signed an order committing Theodore Ginnery to the Department of Mental Health following the return of Thursday’s jury verdict. He will be returned to the Farmington Correctional Center for sex offenders pending an appeal of the verdict.