Experts to review 7 murder cases handled by Minnesota medical examiner accused of false testimony

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — A Minnesota medical examiner who prosecutors say has a history of delivering false or misleading reports may have mishandled at least seven murder cases in which his testimony helped send people to prison, attorneys announced Wednesday.

The announcement followed a sprawling review of cases, some dating back decades, handled by Dr. Michael McGee, a former Ramsey County medical examiner who prosecutors say performed autopsies on cases from 1985 to 2019. McGee’s work was called “unreliable, misleading and inaccurate” by a federal judge, setting off a wide-ranging inquiry into a potential “chain of injustices,” prosecutors said.

Now, a joint team of lawyers and medical experts will determine whether convictions and long sentences built around McGee’s work should be overturned or reduced. Their deep dive into McGee’s history began in fall 2021 after a federal judge threw out the death sentence of a man who was convicted in the high- profile kidnapping and murder of a North Dakota college student.

“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.”

Phone calls and messages to McGee and multiple relatives were not immediately returned Wednesday.

At the Ramsey County Attorney’s Office in St. Paul, a team of lawyers led by Choi said McGee’s work may have resulted in wrongful convictions or inflated charges. Choi cautioned that attorneys had not reached final conclusions about the seven cases, which he did not identify out of respect for the victims’ families. But he said the cases involved people imprisoned for murder.

Kristine Hamann, executive director of Prosecutors’ Center for Excellence, a legal consulting group that helped conduct the review, said the cases were among the most serious in the county, home to Minnesota’s capital city. Convictions secured in the cases rested on cause of death reports that may have been erroneous or misstated by McGee, Hamann said.

The legal team will hire three independent medical examiners to reevaluate McGee’s work in the seven cases and determine whether there might be sufficient cause to recommend that convictions be overturned or sentences reduced.

The attorneys whittled down a list of 215 cases linked to McGee, whose testimony has been questioned on several occasions in recent years. They began looking into McGee’s history after District Judge Ralph Erickson found flaws in McGee’s testimony in the murder trial for Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., a man convicted in the 2003 killing of Dru Sjodin, a North Dakota college student.

Sjodin, a Minnesota woman, was a 22-year-old University of North Dakota student when she was abducted from a Grand Forks, North Dakota, mall parking lot in November 2003. Rodriguez, a sex offender, was arrested the next month.

Erickson said evidence showed McGee, the former Ramsey County medical examiner, was “guessing” on the witness stand and his opinions were not scientifically supported by literature or any other expert who testified at the trial. Erickson referred specifically to McGee’s interpretation of sexual assault evidence. The judge said McGee offered opinions during the trial that were not in his autopsy reports.

Sjodin’s death led to a dramatic shift in the way Minnesota handles sex offenders, with a drastic increase in the number who were committed indefinitely for treatment even after their prison sentences had run their course. Also, the national sex offender public registry, intended to give the public information on the whereabouts of registered sex offenders, was renamed for Sjodin.

Rodriguez was later resentenced to life in prison.

Also at the center of the probe into McGee’s history is the case of Thomas Rhodes. Until his 2023 release, Rhodes served nearly 25 years in connection with his wife’s death before authorities vacated his murder conviction and allowed him to plead guilty to manslaughter.

Rhodes was convicted in 1998 of first- and second-degree murder in the death of his 36-year-old wife, Jane Rhodes, who fell overboard and drowned on a night-time boat ride with her husband on Green Lake in Spicer, Minnesota, in 1996.

The murder conviction hinged on the testimony of McGee, who said Rhodes grabbed his wife by the neck, threw her overboard and ran her over several times. The Conviction Review Unit in the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office examined the case. A forensic pathologist later found that Jane Rhodes’ death was not inconsistent with an accidental fall.

The nearly 25 years Rhodes spent in prison is more than twice the maximum sentence allowed for the manslaughter conviction he later pleaded down to from murder.

Jim Mayer, legal director for The Great North Innocence Project, a nonprofit that works to free wrongfully convicted people, said the harm wrought by McGee’s testimony could be far-reaching

“They talk about where there’s smoke, there’s fire. This is a case where we are beyond the smoke phase. We’ve seen the fire,” Mayer said. “The question is how far the fire has spread.”