Court rebuffs witness' expertise on sex offenders

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- The state must find new evidence if it hopes to have a convicted sexual offender deemed a sexually violent predator, the Missouri Supreme Court said Tuesday.

The state's highest court voted 7-0 to send back to a lower court a case involving Joseph Johnson, who appealed a verdict that would have kept him in the Department of Mental Health's sexually violent offender program.

Johnson served almost five years in prison after pleading guilty to sodomy in 1991. After being released from prison in 1995, he pleaded guilty to one count of sexual assault.

Pending his release on that charge in 1999, the state sought to have him deemed a sexually violent predator.

After a jury agreed, Johnson appealed. He argued that Gerald Hoeflin, a Department of Corrections employee and counselor, should not have been allowed to testify as an expert about Johnson's mental state.

The Supreme Court, in a decision written by Chief Justice Stephen Limbaugh Jr., said that a Newton County judge erred when he let Hoeflin testify as an expert.