Prosecutors allege that a medical examiner from Minnesota, with a history of producing inaccurate and deceptive reports, may have sent the wrong people to prison in at least seven murder cases. On Wednesday, they announced the findings from a comprehensive review of cases that former Ramsey County medical examiner Dr. Michael McGee worked on from 1985 to 2019. McGee's autopsy results—prosecutors claimed during the press conference—were "unreliable, misleading and inaccurate," according to a federal judge who called for an inquiry into a potential "chain of injustices" that may have affected several cases.
A team of lawyers and medical professionals is now looking into the possibility of exonerating… or at least reducing the sentences of those unjustly incarcerated because of McGee's work. They are doing an in-depth study of McGee's history. This started in the fall of 2021. That was when a federal judge set aside the death sentence of a man who had been convicted in the well-publicized murder and kidnapping of a North Dakota college student.
A group of attorneys directed by Choi at the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office in St. Paul reviewed the work of a past prosecutor, John McGee, and said it might have caused inflated charges or wrongful convictions. Choi insisted at a press conference that he and his team had not concluded that any of the seven cases they looked at were caused by McGee’s improper work, but he made it clear that they had serious concerns—that the cases involved seven people under the threat of a murder charge, and that McGee, during his time with the county, might have improperly filed those charges or done similar work on other cases.
“Whenever a judge makes that determination, it really calls into question ... everything the medical examiner has been involved with,” Ramsey County Attorney John Choi said. “Legitimacy and the integrity in of all of our convictions matter in how people trust what happens in the courtroom.”
Three independent medical examiners will be hired by the legal team to take another look at McGee's work in the seven cases. These examiners will determine whether there might be enough reason to recommend that the convictions be overturned or the sentences reduced. The attorneys went through the 215 cases that are linked to McGee. As of late 2021, he was indicted on three counts of sexual assault for allegedly sexually assaulting three women he encountered while he was a medical examiner. The women allege that McGee forced them in various ways to do what he wanted.
In November 2003, a 22-year-old college student named Dru Sjodin was abducted from a mall parking lot in Grand Forks, North Dakota. A man named Alfonso Rodriguez Jr. was arrested a month later for the crime. During the trial, the defense did not provide any alibi for Rodriguez and instead argued that the evidence against him was weak. Erickson (the prosecutor) concluded his arguments by saying, "Even though Alfonso Rodriguez did this horrible thing, he is not what he was portrayed to be."
According to the judge, McGee's trial testimony was contrary to the opinions he'd rendered in his autopsy report. The death of Dru Sjodin clearly had a great impact not just on the family and friends of the victim, but on the greater society of Minnesota as a whole. After her death, the way Minnesota dealt with sex offenders changed pretty dramatically, with policies instituted that resulted in an enormous upturn in the number of offenders committed to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program for indefinite, and sometimes lifelong, treatment, even after their prison sentences had expired.
The investigation into McGee's background also focuses on the Thomas Rhodes case. Until this year, Rhodes served about 25 years in connection with the death of his wife. Authorities had vacated his murder conviction and allowed him to plead guilty to manslaughter instead. In 1998, he was convicted of first- and second-degree murder in his wife’s death. On a night-time boat ride with her husband in 1996, Jane Rhodes fell overboard and drowned.
Rhodes was convicted of murder, based mainly on the testimony of McGee. He said Rhodes grabbed his wife by the neck, threw her overboard, and ran over her several times with their boat. The case was examined by the Conviction Review Unit in the Minnesota Attorney General's Office. A forensic pathologist later determined that Jane Rhodes' death was not inconsistent with having fallen off the boat accidentally. Finally, in 2002, nearly 25 years after the murder conviction, Rhodes pleaded to a lesser charge of manslaughter. The remaining sentences from that plea deal add up to 150 months in prison, which is less than 25 percent of the nearly 25 years he served for the murder conviction.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Dru_Sjodin
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