He has quite a rap sheet.
A Virginia lawmaker who drew gasps from his colleagues when he brandished a borrowed AK-47 during an anti-gun speech Thursday was found guilty in 2002 of committing a vicious 1999 assault, was sanctioned for legal misconduct while prosecuting a rape case, spent six months in jail for contempt of a federal court, and saw his law license revoked in 2003.
Democratic Delegate Joseph Morrissey brought the rifle to the floor of the House of Delegates to demonstrate how easy it is to carry firearms in Virginia. Republican Delegate Todd Gilbert interrupted Morrissey’s speech to ask him to remove his finger from inside the gun’s trigger-guard — a basic gun-safety practice.
But while Morrissey introduced a gun-control bill Thursday aimed at reducing criminal violence in Virginia, he has a history that involves physical violence of another kind.Morrissey paid a man $500,000 in 2007 to settle a 2002 court judgment against him, related to a 1999 physical assault.
According to legal brief filed by the victim’s attorneys, Morrissey shouted, “I’m going to kill you. I’m going to beat your head in,” before beating the victim and “smash[ing] his head into the corner of a brick wall.”
The 2003 revocation of Morrissey’s law license followed that courtroom reckoning, but by then his disciplinary record in the legal profession was already a lengthy one.
After he applied for the reinstatement of his law license, the Virginia State Bar listed a litany of Morrissey’s misdeeds when it published his petition.
……In 1999, the bar suspended Morrissey’s law license again, this time for three years, after he made “public statements about the identity, testimony or credibility of prospective witnesses” in a federal court case.Morrissey was convicted on two counts of contempt of court in that case, and sentenced to 90 days in jail plus three years of probation. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia also disbarred him, effectively denying him future access to plead cases in federal court.
What a fucking scumbag. He’s the consummate Democrat.