Doctors Behaving Badly: Dentist accused of molestation blames Parkinson’s drugs

In the end, the dirty dentist didn't get away with it.

A Collier County Circuit Court judge last week sentenced David Rees Sperry to 10 years in prison for lewd and lascivious battery after Sperry attacked a 14-year-old boy at a beach near Naples, Florida, and forced the boy to perform oral sex on him.

Sperry, 68, retired from a long career as a dentist in Ohio, and his attorneys presented an insanity defense that was nothing if not innovative. They claimed that medications Sperry was taking for Parkinson's and dementia made him unaware of his actions.

Sperry was arrested on April 3, 2007, and had been free on $50,000 bond for the past two years. As Ryan Mills in the Naples Daily News reports:

The boy told deputies Sperry grabbed him as he looked for lizards along a beach trail and forced him to perform oral sex. Deputies searched Sperry's backpack and found two see-through male bathing suits, a condom, suntan lotion, and tooth picks. ... Sperry denied the allegations until the State Attorney's Office received the DNA test results, which showed Sperry's DNA, Assistant State Attorney Steve Maresca told the judge last week. Maresca said that was when defense attorney Amira Fox filed a motion to proceed on an insanity defense and Sperry began frequent visits to doctors.

This, apparently, was the doctor's wake-up call. When he bought the see-through bathing suits and the condom and headed to the beach, he had no idea he would end up grabbing a 14-year-old boy and forcing him into a sex act. He was ready to present his drugs-made-me-do-it defense to a jury when, on the first day of the trial, he decided to plead "no contest" and to present his case, instead, to a judge as a plea for a lighter sentence.

According to the Naples Daily News story, Sperry worried that, were his theory to actually be presented at trial, the jury would have a hard time understanding it.

He explained his decision to plead and accept responsibility. "This defense, probably a jury might not have the capability to understand," he said, citing all the medical experts who would have testified he was involuntarily intoxicated by Mirapex and L-dopa and was unaware of his actions.

Call the FDA. The agency may want to force the makers of levodopa drugs to put a black box warning on their products declaring: MAY CAUSE PREDILECTION FOR BOYS IN BATHING SUITS. As for Mirapex, that drug is used for Parkinson's, but it also is marketed as a treatment for restless leg syndrome. Might we soon see television ads for Mirapex showing retirees lounging on the beach in peek-a-boo shorts and with Cheshire cat grins on their faces? Ease your anxiety and clear your conscience with Mirapex!