Convicted pedophile listed as dangerous offender
Other than his sexual offending, Mr. Harry is a lawabiding citizen.
— Judge Cassandra Malfair
Roy Gabriel Harry, 59, has been declared a dangerous offender.
Judge Cassandra Malfair disclosed her ruling on Thursday at the Prince George Law Courts. Harry, already in custody, was present at the hearing and showed little reaction to the news. He was represented in court by defence counsel Bill Herdy.
Malfair added three more years of federal custody (it was literally a 65 month addition, but calculated to recognize custodial allowances owed to Harry in order that he might receive three actual years inside). This term is to be served at a regional treatment facility for inmates working on behavioral change.
Following those three years, Harry must also be on a powerful form of probation called a Long-Term Supervision Order that gives supervisory authorities strict abilities to guide Harry’s public interactions for 10 years after his release.
This case had some powerful legal pressures to consider, since the dangerous offender designation is a special one under Canadian law. In Harry’s case, had been convicted of sexual offenses against five victims over the years – all of them females, all of them teens or children. He is a confirmed pedophile.
However, according to expert testimony and his long-term record, that’s the only mark against him.
“Other than his sexual offending, Mr. Harry is a law-abiding citizen,” Malfair said.
“He is also a compliant prisoner or parolee, he has no breeches of his conditions, he has no disciplinary record as an inmate,” and his employers gave good reports as to his work ethic and job-site relations.
Furthermore, Harry’s pattern as a sexual offender is narrow. He doesn’t groom victims over time, use elaborate ruses to trick his victims or extort their silence, he doesn’t use aggravated violence beyond the sexual and mental trauma of those moments.
When he does victimize a child it is always someone in a position of trust, in moments of weak resistance like asleep, sometimes with a parent nearby.
In other words, Harry is not very calculating. He’s not very smart at all, according to multiple assessments of his psychology.
One assessment called his mentality “on the border of the mentally handicapped range,” Malfair said.
That makes Harry easier for authorities to supervise. But it also makes him harder to treat, should he accept treatment for himself. So far he has not. In fact, said Malfair, he has been given a number of chances to change but seems unwilling to put any work into stopping his behaviour, leading Malfair to conclude, “He wants to keep on doing what he’s always done.”
Two experts in criminal risk assessment each independently concluded that Harry was a high risk to reoffend without an intensive and long-term (at least 10 years, hence the sentence duration) rehabilitation program.
The problem with a born pedophile, Malfair explained, based on the assessments, is it is the person’s innate and natural sexual preference. Like heterosexuality or homosexuality, it can’t be counselled into something else. The impulses are forever ingrained at the instinct level. All that can be done to spare the suffering of victims is convincing the born pedophile to understand they cannot act on their nature.
On that account, said Malfair, “his attitude is abysmal.” According to those who have observed and assessed Harry, she said, it can be concluded thusfar that Harry shows “no genuine expression of shame, guilt, empathy or desire to change.”
Whenever confronted with the impacts on his victims – one of whom reportedly defecated spontaneously at the mere mention of him – he retorts that he was done worse while a child at St. Joseph’s residential school. The courts have accepted that while there between 1965-68, Harry was anally raped by a priest; was forced to attend, alone, to a small girl over the course of her last days as she died of an unknown disease; plus many other forms of abuse he suffered while there.
While this is acknowledge by his assessors to have traumatized Harry, along with an entire life of almost unfettered poverty and social alienation, these were not what made him a pedophile. Malfair added, as a condition of his custody, that Harry undergo trauma therapy for his own healing so that he might be better prepared to accept the decade of anti-pedophilia counselling that would come next.
“His prospects for treatment are grim,” Malfair said, but the next 13 years would give him the best possible chance for an elderly life lived in the community without hurting any more children, or present all the necessary evidence that his stay in the keep of federal corrections.