A Virginia lawmaker who won re-election from a jail cell last week faces new felony charges related to the sex scandal that led to his conviction for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
Delegate Joe Morrissey, 57, was charged with forgery, felony conspiracy and perjury on Wednesday, after special prosecutor William Neely unsealed an indictment that accused the lawmaker of forging a document and lying under oath about its authenticity. Morrissey is serving a 90-day sentence, reduced from six months, for a conviction relating to his relationship with a 17-year-old girl who worked in his office.
Morrissey was accused of having sex with the girl, who is now 18 and denies she had any inappropriate relations with the lawmaker. She is also pregnant with a child the prosecutor said “perhaps” belongs to Morrissey. Sexual messages and a nude photo of the girl were found on Morrissey’s phone, and he bargained a plea deal to a misdemeanor conviction, maintaining his innocence while avoiding trial on charges of child pornography and indecent liberties with a minor.
Accused alongside Morrissey for forgery and perjury is the girl’s mother, Deidre Warren, who also vouched for the document’s authenticity. The allegedly forged document showed that the girl’s father, Coleman Pride, owed his daughter $14,000 in support payments. It was used by Morrissey’s legal team to try to undermine Pride’s testimony against him.
Morrissey maintains his relationship with the teenager was that of an avuncular figure who helped her family through child-support troubles. Pride told police he had never seen the document, much less signed it.
Shortly after Pride approached the authorities, police gained a search warrant to search the premises of Morrissey’s law firm, noting that the document appeared to merge real and fake materials.
Morrissey, who has work-release privileges but spends his nights in jail, told reporters the charges were false. His colleagues in the Virginia legislature may discipline or bar Morrissey, the house speaker, William Howell, said in a statement, but it appears unlikely they will expel him outright due to the healthy margin of his re-election victory.
Howell said the indictment embarrasses “the oldest continuously operating legislative body in the world”.
Morrissey resigned shortly after his conviction in December, but then quickly entered his name on the special election ballot as an independent candidate. Although only 2,840 people voted for him, that constituted 42% of the vote. Under the terms of a work-release program he was allowed to campaign during the day, so long as he wore a monitoring bracelet and reported back to jail by 8pm.
On election day he told the Associated Press by way of a jailhouse telephone that voters were only “interested in my body of work in the general assembly. Nobody works harder for their constituents than I do.”
Antagonistic relations with the police and prosecutors are nothing new for Morrissey: the Virginia bar suspended his law license after his 10th citation for contempt of court, and court papers indicate he had been jailed or forcibly detained for misconduct five times, including once for courthouse fisticuffs, before the allegations of sexual misconduct with a minor.
He continued to act as an attorney, until Virginia revoked his license for failing to inform clients about his suspension. In 2012, the state supreme court narrowly decided to restore his license.
