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After falling through the cracks, a child molester Melvin Moseley Sr. is finally jailed
Judge sets hearing in two weeks to hear arguments for ultimate sentence
It took nearly eight years, but a Columbus man sentenced in 2003 to 15 years in prison for child molestation was finally taken into custody Tuesday after a hearing in Muscogee County Superior Court. But the proceedings before Chief Judge John Allen did not fully resolve the extraordinary case of Melvin Charles Moseley Sr., a case judges say fell through the cracks of the local criminal justice system.
Moseley, a 70-year-old Vietnam War veteran who had been free on bond since May 2002, will appear before the court once more in two weeks to present mitigating evidence in hopes of receiving the shorter sentence he was all but promised years ago by Judge Doug Pullen. In an interview last week, Pullen took the blame for the inordinate delay in Moseley’s case and called it the most egregious oversight of his decades-long legal career.
Moseley’s defense attorney, Mark Shelnutt, requested time to find character witnesses and dust off the yellowed pages of a case that languished for years and bounced from one judge’s docket to the next. Shelnutt contends that imprisonment at this point would amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
“I didn’t ever believe incarceration was the right thing based on the facts and circumstances,” he said.
Allen agreed to hear Shelnutt’s arguments at the next hearing, but he wasted little time Tuesday in informing the parties that Moseley will await further proceedings in a jail cell.
“We’re not going through this any more,” an uncharacteristically stern Allen said from the bench, chiding Shelnutt at times. “He needs to be surrendered right now.”
Tuesday’s hearing, which was arranged so hastily on Friday that Shelnutt still had not received formal notice of it Tuesday, further underscored the urgency Moseley’s case has caused in the Government Center as years of legal missteps have come to light. The case increasingly has drawn scrutiny from the Judicial Qualifications Commission, and the usually furtive judicial oversight agency made its presence known at Tuesday’s hearing; its director, Jeff Davis, and chief investigator, Richard Hyde, sat on the front row in Allen’s court room scribbling notes and listening intently.
The men also were seen walking into the District Attorney’s Office with LaRae Moore, the assistant district attorney who inherited Moseley’s case in March 2010. The JQC investigation comes as special prosecutor Joe W.
Hendricks Jr. is quickly becoming a familiar yet feared face in Columbus, having been appointed this spring to look into potential judicial misconduct within the Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit.
Hendricks has said he finds Moseley’s case to be strange on a number of levels, and he and Hyde copied and reviewed the case files last week, according to a supervisor in the Superior Court clerk’s office.
Though prosecutors have moved swiftly in recent days to close the file on Moseley and expedite his incarceration, they appear to have softened their stance to a degree on how long the aging man should be imprisoned. District Attorney Julia Slater said last weekend she would push for the full sentence to be imposed.
But the first order of business at Tuesday’s hearing was for Slater, via a motion filed with the court, to remove herself from any personal involvement in the proceedings.
“Her concern was that she was employed with Mark Shelnutt’s office in at least ’04, when the case began appearing again on the docket,” Moore said in an interview. “I guess to eliminate any potential argument, she went ahead and recused herself.”
Slater has given Moore complete authority in the Moseley case.
Asked whether she intends to pursue Moseley’s sentence for the full 15 years, Moore said, “I don’t know at this point in time. That’s probably something that I’ll consult with my chief assistant about.”
A ‘loose’ sentence
Moseley was first arrested in April 2002 after the mother of a 15-year-old girl he met at church called police and said she suspected the two were having a sexual relationship. Moseley admitted to the relationship with the Columbus High student but denied fathering her child.
He spent less than a month in the Muscogee County Jail before he was released on bond, jail records show. A Muscogee County grand jury indicted him in June 2002 on two counts each of statutory rape and aggravated child molestation. More than a year later, Moseley pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of child molestation in a new indictment.
Pullen sentenced Moseley to 15 years in prison but allowed him to remain free on bond pending psychological and sexual testing. At the time, the judge reassured Moseley the sentence wasn’t engraved in stone, and that he would be afforded the opportunity to argue mitigating factors and possibly testify at a later date.
It’s that promise that Shelnutt sought to reinforce to Allen. He pointed to a passage of a transcript of the September 2003 sentencing in which Pullen declared a 15-year prison sentence was “not even in the cards” for Moseley.
“None of us at that time expected for this to be the end of it,” Shelnutt told the judge.
“You’re saying the judge intended for this case to sit around for 10 years?” Allen fired back, growing visibly agitated.
In a separate exchange, Allen acknowledged Moseley had been given “a very loose sentence.”
“I agree what’s happened in this case all along has been loose,” Allen said. “However, this case has come to culmination with me -- pretty quick.”
The hearing also shed new light on a 2010 meeting between Shelnutt, Moore and Superior Court Judge Frank Jordan Jr. After Moseley’s case began popping up on Jordan’s docket, Shelnutt advocated for it to be placed on the court’s dead docket, a designation usually reserved for unadjudicated cases that prosecutors have decided not to pursue. Shelnutt on Tuesday said that Jordan “instructed” him to prepare court documents that would have shuffled the Moseley case to the dead docket. Moore later refused to affix her name to that course of action, though Shelnutt contends she is now overstating her resistance.
When the parties failed to reach an agreement, Jordan told a clerk to put the Moseley case “back on the window sill,” according to court records.
Dismissing or placing on the dead docket a case that already has yielded a conviction and sentence is not allowed under Georgia law, said Frank Martin, a veteran Columbus defense attorney who is not involved in the Moseley case.
Seated not far from the JQC officials at Tuesday’s hearing were two people who took an entirely different interest in Moseley’s case: the victim’s parents.
The victim, now married and serving in the military in Texas, did not attend, but her parents “were representing her interests,” Moore said.
“That’s an old wound that I think they are reluctant to open up for her,” Moore said. “They do want him to go to prison, but they’re not upset. I was honest with them about what had occurred and they understand, and I was honest with them in that I would do everything I could to remedy it.”
Judge sets hearing in two weeks to hear arguments for ultimate sentence
It took nearly eight years, but a Columbus man sentenced in 2003 to 15 years in prison for child molestation was finally taken into custody Tuesday after a hearing in Muscogee County Superior Court. But the proceedings before Chief Judge John Allen did not fully resolve the extraordinary case of Melvin Charles Moseley Sr., a case judges say fell through the cracks of the local criminal justice system.
Moseley, a 70-year-old Vietnam War veteran who had been free on bond since May 2002, will appear before the court once more in two weeks to present mitigating evidence in hopes of receiving the shorter sentence he was all but promised years ago by Judge Doug Pullen. In an interview last week, Pullen took the blame for the inordinate delay in Moseley’s case and called it the most egregious oversight of his decades-long legal career.
Moseley’s defense attorney, Mark Shelnutt, requested time to find character witnesses and dust off the yellowed pages of a case that languished for years and bounced from one judge’s docket to the next. Shelnutt contends that imprisonment at this point would amount to cruel and unusual punishment.
“I didn’t ever believe incarceration was the right thing based on the facts and circumstances,” he said.
Allen agreed to hear Shelnutt’s arguments at the next hearing, but he wasted little time Tuesday in informing the parties that Moseley will await further proceedings in a jail cell.
“We’re not going through this any more,” an uncharacteristically stern Allen said from the bench, chiding Shelnutt at times. “He needs to be surrendered right now.”
Tuesday’s hearing, which was arranged so hastily on Friday that Shelnutt still had not received formal notice of it Tuesday, further underscored the urgency Moseley’s case has caused in the Government Center as years of legal missteps have come to light. The case increasingly has drawn scrutiny from the Judicial Qualifications Commission, and the usually furtive judicial oversight agency made its presence known at Tuesday’s hearing; its director, Jeff Davis, and chief investigator, Richard Hyde, sat on the front row in Allen’s court room scribbling notes and listening intently.
The men also were seen walking into the District Attorney’s Office with LaRae Moore, the assistant district attorney who inherited Moseley’s case in March 2010. The JQC investigation comes as special prosecutor Joe W.
Hendricks Jr. is quickly becoming a familiar yet feared face in Columbus, having been appointed this spring to look into potential judicial misconduct within the Chattahoochee Judicial Circuit.
Hendricks has said he finds Moseley’s case to be strange on a number of levels, and he and Hyde copied and reviewed the case files last week, according to a supervisor in the Superior Court clerk’s office.
Though prosecutors have moved swiftly in recent days to close the file on Moseley and expedite his incarceration, they appear to have softened their stance to a degree on how long the aging man should be imprisoned. District Attorney Julia Slater said last weekend she would push for the full sentence to be imposed.
But the first order of business at Tuesday’s hearing was for Slater, via a motion filed with the court, to remove herself from any personal involvement in the proceedings.
“Her concern was that she was employed with Mark Shelnutt’s office in at least ’04, when the case began appearing again on the docket,” Moore said in an interview. “I guess to eliminate any potential argument, she went ahead and recused herself.”
Slater has given Moore complete authority in the Moseley case.
Asked whether she intends to pursue Moseley’s sentence for the full 15 years, Moore said, “I don’t know at this point in time. That’s probably something that I’ll consult with my chief assistant about.”
A ‘loose’ sentence
Moseley was first arrested in April 2002 after the mother of a 15-year-old girl he met at church called police and said she suspected the two were having a sexual relationship. Moseley admitted to the relationship with the Columbus High student but denied fathering her child.
He spent less than a month in the Muscogee County Jail before he was released on bond, jail records show. A Muscogee County grand jury indicted him in June 2002 on two counts each of statutory rape and aggravated child molestation. More than a year later, Moseley pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of child molestation in a new indictment.
Pullen sentenced Moseley to 15 years in prison but allowed him to remain free on bond pending psychological and sexual testing. At the time, the judge reassured Moseley the sentence wasn’t engraved in stone, and that he would be afforded the opportunity to argue mitigating factors and possibly testify at a later date.
It’s that promise that Shelnutt sought to reinforce to Allen. He pointed to a passage of a transcript of the September 2003 sentencing in which Pullen declared a 15-year prison sentence was “not even in the cards” for Moseley.
“None of us at that time expected for this to be the end of it,” Shelnutt told the judge.
“You’re saying the judge intended for this case to sit around for 10 years?” Allen fired back, growing visibly agitated.
In a separate exchange, Allen acknowledged Moseley had been given “a very loose sentence.”
“I agree what’s happened in this case all along has been loose,” Allen said. “However, this case has come to culmination with me -- pretty quick.”
The hearing also shed new light on a 2010 meeting between Shelnutt, Moore and Superior Court Judge Frank Jordan Jr. After Moseley’s case began popping up on Jordan’s docket, Shelnutt advocated for it to be placed on the court’s dead docket, a designation usually reserved for unadjudicated cases that prosecutors have decided not to pursue. Shelnutt on Tuesday said that Jordan “instructed” him to prepare court documents that would have shuffled the Moseley case to the dead docket. Moore later refused to affix her name to that course of action, though Shelnutt contends she is now overstating her resistance.
When the parties failed to reach an agreement, Jordan told a clerk to put the Moseley case “back on the window sill,” according to court records.
Dismissing or placing on the dead docket a case that already has yielded a conviction and sentence is not allowed under Georgia law, said Frank Martin, a veteran Columbus defense attorney who is not involved in the Moseley case.
Seated not far from the JQC officials at Tuesday’s hearing were two people who took an entirely different interest in Moseley’s case: the victim’s parents.
The victim, now married and serving in the military in Texas, did not attend, but her parents “were representing her interests,” Moore said.
“That’s an old wound that I think they are reluctant to open up for her,” Moore said. “They do want him to go to prison, but they’re not upset. I was honest with them about what had occurred and they understand, and I was honest with them in that I would do everything I could to remedy it.”