Court upholds man’s conviction in teen’s luring, sex assault
Victim testified she was 14 when she met 37-year-old on internet in 2013
A Calgary man serving a six-year prison term for sexually assaulting a teenage girl he met on the internet has lost his appeal of the conviction.
Satinderjit Singh Mangat appealed his 2017 conviction on two counts of luring and one of sexual assault related to the four-month sexual relationship he initiated in the summer of 2013.
A three-member Alberta Court of Appeal panel denied the appeal in a written decision released Monday.
Mangat’s lawyer contended the trial judge erred in determining his client had an onus to support claims he couldn’t drive at the time of the offences due to the effects of shoulder surgery or that his parents would have been home when the sexual activity occurred.
Mangat also appealed on the defence of mistaken belief in age, having claimed at trial that he believed the victim was 30 years old. The appeals court said it found a number of problems with Mangat’s assertion, including the trial judge’s finding that he told the girl his true age.
“That makes the argument about mistaken belief irrelevant,” the appeal court justices wrote. “There is no air of reality to the defence of mistaken belief in age.”
The complainant testified she was 14 when she met Mangat, then 37, on an internet messaging service after being introduced to him by another female youth.
She described sneaking out of her northeast home, hours after first contacting the man she knew as Sam Pat on social media, to meet him in his car in the back alley. The girl testified the two engaged in intercourse multiple times after that first encounter.
Mangat was acquitted on three counts of child pornography. Charges of sexual interference and invitation to sexual touching were stayed.