Woman who breached house arrest jailed for six months
Sentenced to six months after breaching original sentence of house arrest
A judge has ordered Anita Obodzinski, who pleaded guilty to defrauding an elderly woman and then breached her house arrest, to serve the next six months in prison rather than continue to serve out her sentence at home.
Quebec Court Judge Dennis Galiatsatos said in his sentencing ruling on Thursday that Obodzinski’s “continuing attitude of dishonesty and deception speaks volumes about her character, where she is in her rehabilitation process, her acceptance of responsibility and her insight — or lack thereof — regarding her behaviour.”
Obodzinski, 54, and her husband, Arthur Trzciakowski, 51, pleaded guilty in January 2018 to defrauding Veronika Piela out of her life savings when the victim was 89 years old. In 2013, Obodzinski obtained a falsified incapacity mandate that allowed her to take control of Piela’s life, empty more than $474,000 from her bank accounts and force Piela out of her home.
Obodzinski received a sentence of two years less a day to be served in the community, including a year of house arrest, followed by three years’ probation, after pleading guilty to six charges, including obstructing justice, mischief and knowingly using forged documents.
However, she twice violated her house arrest, despite a verbal warning from a correctional officer after the first breach, by not being home when correctional officers phoned to check that she was respecting her conditions. The first violation occurred seven months into her sentence last year, an aggravating factor, Galiatsatos said, since she committed the breach early in her sentence.
Galiatsatos, who spent more than an hour reading aloud large portions of his 34-page ruling in a Montreal courtroom, said he found Obodzinski’s excuses for not answering the phone calls from correctional officers, including that she was in a deep sleep, to be “unrealistic, contradictory, sometimes incoherent and ultimately untruthful.”
He also said he used the seriousness of Obodzinski’s original offences, which he described as “despicable crimes,” as a factor in determining the sanction for violating the terms of her house arrest.
One mitigating factor, however, was that she had completed the 240 hours of community service that were part of her sentence ahead of schedule, he said.
When the judge finished reading his ruling, he ordered that Obodzinski, who was present, be immediately taken into custody.
Galiatsatos also declared on Thursday that Obodzinski’s original sentence was “illegal in the first place.” It was imposed by a different judge after she pleaded guilty to the six charges that included breaking into her victim’s home.
While the prosecution and defence at the time of her guilty plea had submitted a joint recommendation that she serve her conditional sentence in the community, Galiatsatos noted that a change in law in 2012 had actually disqualified the offence of being unlawfully in a dwelling house from eligibility for a conditional sentence served in the community.
“The offender clearly benefitted from this oversight and has thus enjoyed a clemency that even Parliament has specifically excluded,” the judge said.
However, he added, he did not take that into consideration in determining the sanction for Obodzinski’s breaches of her house arrest since he said he doesn’t feel he has the power to remedy the situation and because it might prompt the defence to withdraw her guilty plea.
At a hearing earlier in March over her violations of her house arrest, the prosecution and Obodzinski’s lawyer presented a common suggestion to add 2.5 months of house arrest to her sentence.
Galiatsatos said at the time that he was appalled by the suggestion.
In his sentencing ruling on Thursday, Galiatsatos went further, admonishing the prosecution for agreeing to more house arrest as a sanction for violating her house arrest.
“With great respect, the submission made by the Crown here was inappropriate and unacceptable under the circumstances,” the judge said.
The judge said that ordering more house arrest rather than incarceration would be viewed “by reasonable and informed persons as a breakdown in the proper functioning of the justice system and would deplete any confidence in the conditional-sentence system.”
At the hearing earlier in March, Obodzinski had asked Galiatsatos to allow her to continue her house arrest so she can keep taking her teenage daughter to horseback riding lessons and driving her to private school. Galiatsatos said he didn’t believe Obodzinski’s claims that she’s the only person who can take her daughter to horseback riding, that horseback riding is therapy recommended by a therapist in Boston, that it would be cruel and unusual if her daughter had to take public transit to school or Obodzinski’s claims about her family’s dependence on her as the sole breadwinner.
Piela died in December 2016, after the preliminary inquiry began but before verdicts were rendered.
“I have no words to express the disgust I feel,” Quebec Court Judge Pierre Labelle said in January 2018 when Obodzinski and Trzciakowski pleaded guilty before him. lgyulai@postmedia.com twitter.com/ CityHallReport
(Obodzinski’s) continuing attitude of dishonesty and deception speaks volumes about her character.