This story was updated at 1:15 p.m. with comments from Dan Patterson, the Greene County Prosecuting Attorney.
James Norman Harper, who once lived in Springfield but has been in prison in Licking, entered a negotiated plea of guilty to three different sex crimes involving a girl who was 6 years old.
Harper was sentenced to 50 years in prison.
In 2021, Harper was convicted in a Christian County case and sentenced to 300 years in prison. According to court documents, the two victims — one in Greene County and one in Christian County — are related. One victim was 5 and one was 6 at the time.
Harper stood before Greene County Circuit Judge Kaiti Greenwade Wednesday morning and pleaded guilty to statutory rape in the first degree, for which he was sentenced to 20 years in prison; statutory sodomy or attempted sodomy, for which he was sentenced to 20 years; and child molestation in the first degree, for which he was sentenced to 10 years.
He is to serve those three sentences consecutively, meaning one after the other.
But they are to be served concurrently with the 300-year sentence, meaning the 300-year sentence has not been lengthened.
Harper tentatively had been scheduled to go on trial on Monday, June 10, in Springfield.
Harper was charged in Greene County in 2019, the same year he was charged with the similar crime in Christian County.
Why prosecute someone already sentenced to 300 years?
The Hauxeda reached out to Dan Patterson, Greene County Prosecuting Attorney. First, to ask him the reasoning for prosecuting a man already sentenced to 300 years in prison. Patterson responded via email:
“There are several considerations that go into that calculus,” he wrote. “While the direct appeal of the Christian County case was recently concluded, affirming the conviction, the case still has potential post-conviction relief motions that may be litigated.
“If the defendant were to be successful in obtaining a new trial in Christian County, we would not have wanted to start a case after all of that delay for practical and victim-related considerations. Second and — in this case, more importantly — the victim in the Christian County case was different than the victim in the Greene County case and it was important in both this type of case and in this particular case that he (Harper) be held accountable for his abuse of both victims.”
Patterson was also asked why it took so long for the Greene County case to come to a conclusion; the Christian County case was concluded in 2021.
“The Greene County case also involved a co-defendant, Shawn Martin, who was tried in Greene County first. In addition, this case was affected by the lack of jury trials conducted in Greene County Circuit Court during the height of the pandemic from 2020-21, and by the following turnover of judges in the Greene County Circuit Court.”
Patterson also said via email that an additional delay was caused when the defendant went from a private lawyer to a public defender.
Co-defendant sentence to life in 2022
A forensic interview was done of the Greene County victim at the Child Advocacy Center in Springfield on Oct. 10, 2019. The girl reported to the interviewer where she was touched and how she was assaulted, according to court documents.
The other defendant in the Greene County case was Shawn Kelly Martin, 45. He convicted by a jury of first-degree statutory rape and four counts of statutory sodomy and sentenced to life in prison in 2022.
According to court documents, Martin and Harper were once cellmates. Upon their releases from jail, according to Martin, they shared sexual access to the same young girl in Greene County.
The two men have a history of sex crimes with children and were on the Missouri State Highway Patrol Sex Offender Registry long before 2019.
According to the registry, Harper was convicted of child molestation in the first degree in Ozark in 1998. He was 17 and his victim was 5.
According to the registry, Martin was convicted of statutory rape in the second degree in 2002 in Crane. He was 23 at the time and his victim was 13.
