By Jeff Lehr
jlehr@joplinglobe.com
A Jasper County judge on Monday ordered a 25-year-old Joplin man committed to the Missouri Department of Mental Health after he entered a plea of not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect to a charge of having sexual relations with an underage girl three years ago.
Circuit Judge Gayle Crane found at a hearing in Jasper County Circuit Court in Joplin that Brandon P. Hilton, 1925 S. Grand Ave., was “suffering from a mental disease or defect excluding responsibility, and that the defendant did not know or appreciate the nature, quality or wrongfulness of his alleged conduct” that drew the charge of first-degree statutory sodomy that he was facing.
The judge ordered the defendant confined in the state’s mental-health-care system until such time that it is determined “that he does not have and in the reasonable future is not likely to have a mental disease or defect rendering him dangerous to the safety of himself or others or is unable to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law.”
Court documents say he will be confined at Fulton State Hospital.
Hilton became the subject of an investigation by the Carl Junction Police Department in January 2006, when the mother of a 13-year-old girl reported that her daughter had told a counselor at a residential treatment center where she was staying that she’d had sex with Hilton in August 2005.
The girl repeated the allegation in an interview with police and a state child-abuse investigator, and at a preliminary hearing. Hilton allegedly admitted to police that he had oral sex with the girl and touched her inappropriately, but he denied having sexual intercourse with her.
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