Child rapist spent years wasting court’s time
Court takes dim view of appeal by man who backed out of plea deal to ‘roll the dice’
Serial child rapist Ibata Noric Hexamer, a former DJ and political organizer for several city councillors and the federal NDP, has spent years wasting court time.
Arrested in 2010, he pleaded guilty in 2012 to three charges of sexual assault with a weapon (a knife), one of sexual assault, and two of confinement involving four girls from 1995 through 2009.
His computer was stuffed with child porn.
This pathological predator threatened to stab a six-yearold in Surrey before forcing her 12-year-old brother and his 15-year-old friend to lie down in the woods and look away while he sexually assaulted her.
He assaulted a 13-year-old in a stairwell of a Vancouver elementary school.
Seventeen charges were dropped as a result of the plea bargain.
Yet, about two years after the guilty pleas were entered and 19 months after an Agreed Statement of Facts was filed, but before sentencing, Hexamer tried to renege on the plea deal, alleging he didn’t know what he was doing.
He later claimed four of the six (!) lawyers who represented him from 2010 to 2014 were incompetent.
It’s hard not be infuriated that Hexamer could draw out proceedings to the extent he did — thumbing his nose at his victims and the public.
One of his first lawyers arranged for him to plead guilty and accept 15 years in prison to avoid a dangerous offender designation with its attendant indefinite prison term.
On Aug. 3, 2012, Hexamer signed a document that included the admissions: “I acknowledge that I am guilty . ... I am aware that the joint sentencing position entails a custodial sentence of 15 years for the offences. … I am making this decision and instruction voluntarily and of my free will.”
His pleas were entered that day. That’s when the 50-year-old started gaming the system.
Sentencing was originally set for Dec. 21, 2012, but as it approached Hexamer instructed his third lawyer to seek an adjournment without telling the court why.
The lawyer refused, and was fired. Sentencing was postponed until Jan. 29, 2013.
On Jan. 25, lawyer No. 4 won an adjournment.
On Feb. 28, the parties finalized the Agreed Statement of Facts, but lawyer No. 4 ceased acting for Hexamer in November 2013 because Hexamer wanted to withdraw his pleas and “go back to square one.”
Hexamer claimed his pleas were uninformed, involuntary and equivocal, and that breaches of his charter rights by police should have led to a stay of the charges.
As a result, a handful of his lawyers were grilled over a week about their conduct. Imagine having to defend yourself against the baseless claims of this evil creep!
Despite his 11th-hour protestations, the court decided Hexamer was no fool and his guilty pleas were valid.
His whining was dismissed as balderdash and four years after he should have been sentenced, in 2016, Hexamer was declared a dangerous offender and incarcerated indefinitely.
The top bench, thankfully, has now also given his protestations short shrift.
“We dismissed this appeal from the bench with reasons to follow,” B.C. Court of Appeal Justice Gregory Fitch said. “We did so because there is no merit in any of the grounds advanced by the appellant.”
In his unanimous decision, supported by colleagues Daphne Smith and Gail Dickson, Fitch said Hexamer admitted his guilt, so police conduct didn’t matter.
He never had any defence and there was no air of reality to his accusations.
DNA established the same man committed the 1995, 2007 and 2009 attacks. Cellphone records and the victims’ descriptions allowed detectives to identify Hexamer as the prime suspect.
On Nov. 18, 2010, officers visited the home he shared with his mother while he was out and, using a ruse, persuaded her to lick and seal an envelope, unwittingly providing them with a DNA sample. The genetic material indicated she was probably the rapist’s mother.
Police then arrested Hexamer at a restaurant, also seizing a fork he used. The DNA profile from castoff material on the fork matched the rapist’s with a probability of 1 in 1.0 quadrillion certainty.
Hexamer made the deal as a “trade-off ” to avoid the “dangerous offender” designation and knew walking away might backfire, the lawyer who negotiated it testified. He was fired.
Engaged to decide whether a charter challenge of the admissibility of the DNA surreptitiously obtained from the mother was worth a try, another lawyer said why bother?
Even if that evidence was excluded, it would be a “pyrrhic victory” — the Crown had damning DNA from the restaurant fork and samples collected as a result of a warrant.
Fitch said Hexamer simply decided to “roll the dice” contrary to legal advice.
“While (he) ‘may now have buyer’s remorse’ with respect to the outcome, there was no miscarriage of justice in the way in which that outcome was reached,” the appellant court concluded.
Just a terrible waste of public money and court time.