A judge will decide whether a 78-year-old Warren man with a more than 40-year history of sexual assaults is competent to stand trial.
Judge John Martin heard testimony Friday, Oct. 9 in the case of Glenn Reed. Reed is charged with failing to comply with the state’s sex offender registry law for not returning required forms and for moving without notifying law enforcement. He was charged in 2023 but the case has been delayed until a decision was made on his competence to stand trial.
Defense attorney Kayla Alves called one person to testify, Robert Riley of the State Forensic Service which oversees and conducts mental health evaluations of defendants.
Riley said when he interviewed Reed, the man claimed that he has been in regular contact with Sandra Bullock and wanted to get the case cleared up so he could move out of state to be with her.
Assistant District Attorney Christopher Fernald asked the forensics expert on whether Reed could be claiming he believed he had a relationship with Bullock in order to be found incompetent or whether someone could be corresponding with Reed and scamming him.
Riley said he believes that Reed had mild cognitive impairments but did not have dementia. He also said that Reed understands the charge and the court system.
Judge Martin took the matter under advisement.
Reed was last convicted in April 2018 in Waldo County of two counts of unlawful sexual touching in 2016 and was sentenced to 364 days in jail.
Earlier, he had been sentenced to six years and 10 months for sexually assaulting an 11-year-old girl in 2011. He was out on probation when he committed the 2016 assault.
Reed’s history of sexual assault dates back more than 40 years. On multiple occasions he has had convictions delayed or scuttled by mistrials or overturned on appeal. When the convictions have been upheld, suspended sentences and good behavior credits dramatically shortened his time behind bars.
In 1982 he was convicted of raping a 16-year-old girl he picked up in his car in Lincolnville. In that case, Reed offered the girl a ride, then refused to let her out of the car, brought her to his house and sexually assaulted her.
The conviction was overturned by Maine Judicial Supreme Court on grounds that the trial judge should have allowed testimony from Reed that the girl was a voluntary social companion. A second trial ended with a deadlocked jury. After a third trial and failed appeal in 1984, he was convicted and served almost three years in prison.
In 1987, soon after he got out, he was charged with three counts of gross sexual misconduct. One of the allegations was that Reed sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl whom he was driving to Penobscot Medical Center in Rockport to have casts removed from both arms.
Reed, a lifetime registrant on the Maine Sex Offender Registry, was released on bail after serving 10 months of a 12-year sentence. In 1989, the Maine Supreme Court overturned his conviction on grounds that observations from an expert witness that the victim showed signs of having been abused could not be proven by empirical evidence. The case was eventually dismissed.
In 2013, Reed was sentenced to six months in prison and a year of probation for groping a sales clerk in Belfast. The victim said Reed claimed he was having a bad day and wanted a hug. When she obliged, he groped her and made sexual comments, according to previously published reports.
His 2011 rape of an 11-year-old girl came to light in 2014 when the girl, then 14, wrote about it in a school essay that was turned over to police. Reed was charged, but a mistrial kept him out of jail until 2016 when he negotiated a plea deal for eight years with all but one year suspended.
Reed’s 2016 prison term was stayed for a month so he could have a medical procedure for gallstones.
Reed never had the procedure, and halfway through the month, his stay was revoked after a prescription for 224 oxycodone pills that he filled on the day he was sentenced came up 114 pills short in a random probation check. Reed variously claimed that a dog had knocked them into the toilet and that he himself had knocked them into the toilet after someone walked in on him while he was naked in the bathroom.
A probation officer in 2017 wrote that Reed “does not seem willing or able to stop victimizing people; furthermore, he is not even willing to admit the fact that he is a danger.”
“Based on his performance while on probation,” he wrote, “it seems the only way to manage Mr. Reed and prevent him from victimizing more people will be a full revocation of this probation and long-term incarceration.”
This story appears through a media partnership with Midcoast Villager.