Crown seeks 20-25 years in jail for killer
Serial abuser who beat girlfriend to death was a known menace, victim’s brother says
A man who brutally beat his girlfriend to death and left her decomposing body in his apartment for nearly a month should spend 20-25 years behind bars before he can apply for parole, a prosecutor argued Monday.
In October, a B.C. Supreme Court jury found Daniel Alphonse Paul, 45, guilty of the second-degree murder of Crystal Rose Paul, 36, a mother of five.
Second-degree murder carries a mandatory sentence of life in prison with a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 25 years of parole ineligibility.
At a sentencing hearing Monday, Crown counsel Daniel Mulligan said that, given the accused’s character and the circumstances of the offence, Paul’s offence was at the highest level of moral culpability and dangerousness, and close to first-degree murder.
Mulligan cited a lengthy history of Paul assaulting his intimate partners, attacks that dated back to 1991 and escalated in severity over time. He beat one of his early victims and bit her forehead and burned her three-year-old son with a lighter.
Eventually, in 2004, following a series of convictions and an offence in which he committed the sexual and aggravated assault of a victim, the Crown sought to have him declared a dangerous offender and jailed indefinitely.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice William Grist heard that he was a high risk to reoffend if his behaviour wasn’t modified by effective treatment, but decided there was hope and his risk to the community could be managed, and he was instead declared a long-term offender and sentenced to four years in prison and a five-year supervision order.
At the time it was impressed upon Paul, an Aboriginal man, that if he did not take the counselling as directed, he would be at risk of killing a partner, noted Mulligan.
“He’s been a one-man wrecking ball in the Indigenous communities, leaving a devastating path of physical and emotional damage among the women and children who have either been victimized by or witnesses to the brutality,” the prosecutor told B.C. Supreme Court Justice Christopher Grauer.
“In this case, he’s left five children without a mother and an entire community traumatized by thoughts about what they could or should have done to prevent what seems like the inevitability of this murder.”
Sentencings of Aboriginal people in Canada must take the accused person’s heritage into account.
Mulligan argued that in this case, the accused’s Aboriginal background, including his parents being abused in residential schools and Paul witnessing abuse and suffering from alcohol abuse, was overwhelmed by the severity of the offence and Paul’s criminal history.
John Turner, a lawyer for Paul, told the judge that his client would always suffer the significant effects of his Aboriginal heritage and argued that there was still some hope for his rehabilitation.
Turner called for a parole ineligibility period of 15 years.
Outside court, members of the victim’s family said the accused should have been declared a dangerous offender in the earlier court case and jailed indefinitely.
“That’s my baby sister,” said Charles Paul, a brother of the victim. “You grow up with her, she’s your blood and then she’s stolen.”
As for the accused, the brother called him a “predator” who was known to be a menace to the Aboriginal community near Hope.
The judge said he would impose sentence Friday.