Man gets 4 ½ years for horrific attack on ex-fiancée
Edwin James Smith left his former fiancée permanently scarred
Provincial court Judge Mike Madden presented his sentence for Edwin James Smith on Monday and recounted details of the serious assault he committed on his former fiancée.
“The assault was a serious one with rather horrific injuries to the victim’s face which required a number of stitches and left a permanent scar,” Madden said. “To pull someone by the face until the face tears is an act of violence that inevitably invokes shock and disgust.”
Madden found Smith, 63, guilty in April of an aggravated assault against his former partner in September 2020. Police were called to the couple’s St. John’s apartment and found the woman outside with a serious laceration that left her lip hanging down and requiring emergency medical treatment. The apartment was covered in blood and so were Smith’s hands, clothes and bedding, when RNC officers found him asleep in his bed. Catching sight of himself in a mirror as he was being arrested, Smith said, “Damn, I look good.”
Smith testified at trial, but the judge rejected his suggestion that the red staining was red paint. Nor did Madden accept Smith’s suggestion that, although he didn’t remember everything about the night in question, he may have injured his fiancée by accident or in self-defence.
On Monday, Madden said Smith did not show any remorse.
“The injury was not lifethreatening, but the victim must have suffered a lot of pain, certainly lost a lot of blood, looking at the photographs, required immediate medical attention and said she found the incident traumatic,” the judge said, adding the injury had left the woman with a permanent scar.
Smith, who attended his sentencing hearing via video from Her Majesty’s Penitentiary, has a 12-page criminal record consisting mainly of property crimes as well as a conviction for assaulting a police officer in 2017 and two assaults against his same partner in 2018.
“Unfortunately, offences of violence seem to be coming to the forefront,” Madden said of Smith’s crimes.
Madden sentenced Smith to 4 ½ years in prison, to be followed by a 10-year firearms ban and an order to submit a DNA sample to a police database. With credit given for the time he has spent on remand, Smith has a little less than 3 ½ years to serve.