Voyeur stepdad’s lawyer argues for house arrest
Jail time isn’t required in the case of a Penticton man who admitted to secretly recording his teenaged stepdaughter and sharing the photos with an undercover FBI agent, his lawyer argued Friday.
The offender, who can’t be named due to a publication ban meant to protect the girl’s identity, pleaded guilty to a single count of distributing child pornography and his sentencing hearing began Tuesday in B.C. Supreme Court.
While the Crown recommended a prison sentence in the range of 36 to 42 months, the man’s own lawyer argued for a conditional sentence of two years’ house arrest, followed by three years’ probation.
Defence counsel James Pennington acknowledged Friday his recommendation is “swimming upstream” in light of the disputed one-year mandatory minimum jail term for such offences, but, “If anybody should contemplate a community-based sentence, it’s (the offender here) given the work he’s done since his arrest.”
That work, said Pennington, has included 2 1/2 years of weekly counselling sessions with a specialist in the field of sex offenders, which resulted in a realization that child pornography is not a victimless crime.
The offender “does not seek to downplay the seriousness of what he’s done or his thinking process at the start of all of this, and the counselling that he did engage in was (painful), but it... brought him to the realization of just how wrong he was during the period this filming was taking place,” said Pennington.
“Fortunately for him, he’s come to the realization before going to jail that those weren’t just pictures. Other offenders have to go to jail before they gain that insight.”
Pennington also pointed to his client’s lack of a prior criminal record, co-operation with police, compliance with bail conditions, guilty plea and designation as an average risk to reoffend as other mitigating factors in favour of a conditional sentence.
“I don’t mean to be overly dramatic or anything like that, but one could say his arrest and being charged is his road to Damascus,” said Pennington in reference to a Biblical tale about personal awakening.
Justice Gordon Funt is expected to deliver his decision Sept. 9.
During her submissions earlier in the week, Crown counsel Ann Lerchs called for a stiff prison sentence to help condemn the offenders’ actions and deter others from doing the same.
Court heard the offender on Jan. 7, 2020, began communicating via the Kik online messaging service with the undercover FBI agent, who was posing as a pedophile in a chat room where members exchanged child pornography and erotica.
The FBI agent struck up a digital conversation with the offender, and over the next day received 13 different images of the offender’s stepdaughter in various states of undress. The images were recorded using spy cameras the offender set up in his family’s home, including the bathroom.
The offender admitted he was attracted to the girl, then 15, and had been secretly recording her since she was 12. The FBI agent even got the offender to send a fresh photo showing the offender holding up three fingers in front of a unique shower curtain that was in the background of one of the girl’s photos. With that confirmation in hand, the FBI alerted the RCMP, who executed a search warrant at the offender’s Penticton home on Jan. 11, 2020.
Mounties seized electronics and storage devices containing 314 images and 20 videos that met the definition of child pornography. Some of the images and videos depicted the stepdaughter, while others showed unknown females between the ages of five and 15.
While the mandatory minimum sentence for child pornography offences is one year in jail, a B.C. Supreme Court judge in March ruled that penalty is unconstitutional because it would amount to cruel and unusual punishment in some cases. The mandatory minimum has also been struck down in Ontario.