The Pennsylvania State Superior Court has upheld a prison sentence of a former Tyrone Hospital emergency room doctor, Barry Bender.
He was sentenced last year after pleading guilty to charges he had sexual encounters with young males by trading alcohol and drugs in return for the activity.
Bender was sentenced to 10 to 20 years in state prison, but not before claiming he was wanted to withdraw his guilty pleas. The 57-year-old former Tyrone doctor entered guilty pleas in October of 2003 to two felony counts of involuntary sexual deviate intercourse, felonies of prescribing or dispensing medicine outside his practice and conspiracy to deliver cocaine and ecstasy and soliciting for purposes of involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, and misdemeanor crimes of corruption of minors and selling/furnishing alcohol to minors.
The state’s Attorney General’s Office, who prosecuted the case, dropped dozens of other charges.
According to a previous Daily Herald article, Bender petitioned the court to withdraw the guilty plea citing his attorney, Thomas Dickey of Altoona, was too wrapped up in another case to give him proper representation. At the time, Bender claimed Dickey rushed the plea bargaining process in his case.
The Blair County Court of Common Pleas rejected Bender’s request to have the guilty pleas withdrawn and Bender went to prison in early December of 2003.
The state’s superior court ruled last week that Bender’s sentence should be allowed to stand.
The motion to withdraw the guilty pleas was filed on Bender’s behalf by attorney Brian Walk. Walk was practicing law in Harrisburg at the time and since has relocated his office to Hershey.
This morning, a spokesperson at Walk’s office said the attorney no longer represented Bender. She couldn’t confirm when Walk had stopped representing him but said he was not his attorney at the time of the state’s ruling last week. The spokesperson had no knowledge of who was currently representing Bender in his legal affairs.
