Crown appeals jail sentence for sex assaults

Piano teacher’s punishment called ‘manifestly’ unfit

Prosecutors are appealing the sentence of a former Vancouver piano teacher who was found guilty of sexually assaulting five of his female students.

After his conviction earlier this year, David Chen, 69, received a 75-day jail term to be served on weekends, a 21-month conditional sentence to be served in the community, and one year of probation.

At trial, prosecutors had called for a 40- to 44-month jail term for Chen, a well-known and highly regarded piano teacher who committed the sex offences against girls between the ages of 11 and 19, spanning a period of 19 years from 1994 to 2013.

On Wednesday, Crown counsel Lara Vizsolyi told a three-judge panel of the B.C. Court of Appeal that the sentencing judge, B.C. Supreme Court Judge Catherine Murray, made a number of errors in principle that rendered the sentence “manifestly” unfit.

Vizsolyi said the judge had failed to give sufficient weight to the sentencing principles of denunciation and deterrence and to the fact that Chen had committed a breach of trust against his students, who cannot be identified due to a publication ban.

Vizsolyi told the panel that Murray appeared to have set out with a conditional sentence in mind without considering the offences individually.

The prosecutor said the judge had cited only one of two victimimpact statements in her ruling and had mistaken the age of one of the victims.

The finding of the judge that the offences, most of which involved Chen touching the breasts of the victims over their clothes, were at the “minor end of the scale” of sexual offences was mistaken, Vizsolyi said.

The prosecutor said that all sex offences against children are serious, especially where there is a breach of trust.

“These offences were not at the minor end of the scale,” Vizsolyi said.

Chen’s lawyer Michael Klein told the panel that the judge had made no such errors and that the sentence was not demonstrably unfit.

“There’s nothing illegal about the sentence, nothing unlawful about it,” he said.

Asked by B.C. Court of Appeal Justice David Tysoe as to what made the case exceptional so as to allow a conditional sentence to be imposed, Klein replied that the level of invasiveness of Chen’s crimes was not at the level of other cases.

Klein told the panel that deference should be given to a sentencing judge who has heard all of the circumstances of a case.

Court heard that Chen, who was sentenced in July, has already served out the jail portion of the sentence and is now serving the conditional sentence.

After the submissions by the lawyers were finished, Tysoe said he and his fellow judges on the panel — Peter Willcock and John Hunter — would give their decision on the appeal on Friday.