A month after the Michigan Court of Appeals unanimously overturned the conviction of Joseph Morrison, who was convicted in 2022 of materially supporting the kidnapping plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, two of his co-defendants, Pete Musico and Paul Bellar, have similarly had their convictions overturned by the Court of Appeals — on the basis of Morrison’s case.
In a decision released Monday, Court of Appeals judges Michael Kelly, Sima Patel and Daniel S. Korobkin unanimously agreed that, based on the decision by a different panel in Morrison’s case, “a conviction of providing material support for an act of terrorism cannot be based upon a predicate offense of kidnapping.”
That decision was based on the 2006 amendment to Michigan’s kidnapping statute, which removed specific reference to use of force in kidnapping. The terrorism statute, on the other hand, does specifically refer to the use of physical force — which the judges determined makes it so that kidnapping alone cannot count as terrorism.
The court is bound in Musico and Bellar’s cases by the interpretation of the kidnapping and terrorism statutes in Morrison’s case, the opinion continued, and as such also bound “by the determination that kidnapping is not a violent felony that can permissibly form the basis for a conviction of providing material support for an act of terrorism.”
Musico and Bellar both faced convictions of providing material support for an act of terrorism, commission of a felony motivated by gang membership or association, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony, the same convictions that Morrison had faced.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel was quick to announce that she intends to appeal Musico and Bellar’s cases, as she stated her intent to do in Morrison’s.
“It is clear that all three of these defendants engaged in a coordinated plan to kidnap and harm the governor and cause mayhem and destruction across our communities in the process,” Nessel said in a press release following Monday’s opinion. “There is no word to describe this other than violent. My office will not downplay domestic terrorism and will not stand by while criminal statutes meant to preserve public safety are arbitrarily gutted. We have already started the process to appeal the disastrous decision in Mr. Morrison’s case, and we will not hesitate to do the exact same for Mr. Musico and Mr. Bellar.”
She also called the decision in the previous ruling “linguistic gymnastics to overturn the conviction of an extremist” and said that it created a “broken precedent” in the courts.
The decision in Morrison’s case came from a conservative panel of judges — including the author of the decision, Mark Boonstra, who penned a concurrence to a 2020 ruling striking down the governor’s vaping ban writing of Whitmer that, “She has a tyrannical soul, and a tyrannical soul will yield to nothing but superior force. Somehow Whitmer, and others like her, will have to be compelled to respect the rule of law and the rights of the people.”
Following Morrison’s conviction being overturned, a spokesperson for Nessel’s office confirmed to the Advance that Court of Appeals decisions become effective 56 days after their issuance or, if an application for leave to appeal is filed within that time, after the disposition of the application by the Michigan Supreme Court, meaning that all three individuals will remain incarcerated while the appeals process plays out.
