A district judge erred when he gave a onetime Twin Cities psychiatrist a longer prison sentence for the sexual abuse of a patient after he appealed his initial term, the Minnesota Court of Appeals has ruled.
Monday’s ruling sends the case back to Dakota County District Court for the resentencing of Gavin P. Meany, who pleaded guilty to four counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct.
Meany remains in a correctional facility in Lino Lakes ahead of his resentencing, which has yet to be scheduled.
Meany initially was sentenced in September 2020 by Judge Jerome Abrams to a term of 7½ years. Meany appealed, claiming he was misled to believe that his supervised release would be 10 years and not for life.
District Judge Timothy McManus then sentenced Meany in November 2022 to a term of 12¾ years and retained his lifetime of supervised release.
In Monday’s reversal, a three-member panel of the Court of Appeals was unanimous in calling the lengthier term excessive.
“Based on our collective experience in reviewing criminal sexual-conduct convictions,” Appeals Court Judge Matthew Johnson wrote, “we conclude that an aggregate prison sentence of no more than 90 months is not unreasonable, inappropriate, excessive, [or] unjustifiably disparate.”
The woman told Burnsville police in 2019 that she had been abused over a five-year period by Meany while receiving psychiatric treatment for an eating disorder and past sexual trauma. The sexual contact first occurred in Meany’s office in St. Louis Park and later in his Burnsville office and at his Apple Valley home.