Area man cleared of sexual assault
A panel of Fayette County jurors acquitted Joseph Morrell Jr. of sexually abusing a child. Morrell testified Tuesday he did not tell a state police trooper that he might have been “blocking” out sexually abusing the child.
Instead, Morrell said trooper Brian R. Burden pressured him into writing that in a statement, and he proclaimed his innocence to jurors.
“If he was truly innocent, why did he say that he didn’t remember?” questioned Jack R. Heneks Jr., the county’s special child abuse prosecutor, in his closing remarks to jurors. “Are those the words of a truly innocent (man) when accused of sexually abusing (a child)?”
“I suggest to you those are damning words,” said Heneks during his closing remarks.
Jurors acquitted Morrell of two counts each of rape and statutory sexual assault for abusing the now-9-year-old girl at different periods between 1996 and 1998.
Morrell’s defense attorney, Brent E. Peck, asked jurors to focus on the evidence and not the image of a soft-spoken little girl who took her teddy bear to the witness stand with her.
“(The alleged victim) was a cute little girl … but that doesn’t make her testimony believable,” said Peck.
He suggested that the girl only told her mother that Morrell was abusing her because a relative told the girl’s mother she was touching herself sexually.
“She was caught doing something bad by her aunt and she made up a story,” Peck told jurors.
In his closing remarks, Heneks called that argument “absurd” and asked jurors to recognize that the young victim expressed no ill will toward Morrell and had no reason to make up allegations.
“You heard no animosity from her. You heard no anger,” said Heneks. “Thankfully, at this age, she’s not sure why these things happened … or how wrong the defendant was to do this to her.”
Heneks also noted that Burden first interviewed the victim and her mother in January 2000, and then reinterviewed the child again in September just before filing charges against Morrell.
Burden, said Heneks, reinterviewed the child to discern for sure if the girl’s story was consistent and believable.