Delayed sentence was right call
Sex offender gets to finish his school year first
By his social media presence, which is not how a young person should ever be judged, Connor Neurauter sounds like a cruel and unappealing character, or, as some might say, a caricature of the big- shot junior hockey player, a goalie, that he was then.
In 2016, as a 19- year- old, he tweeted: “Can you put your notch count on your resume” and “Workin out won’t change your face.”
Three years earlier, as a 16-year-old, he tweeted such gems as “Great tits behind the canucks bench tonight” and “The difference between confidence and cockiness is my eight foot dick” and, charmingly, “Don’t wear muscle shirts if you have the physique of a holocaust victim.”
But he was a teenager then, and it’s for his conduct as a teenager — a young person, stupid and clueless — that last week, he pleaded guilty in provincial court in Kamloops, B.C., to one count of sexual interference with a person under 16.
He was duly convicted and sentenced to 90 days in jail, as well as two years on probation. He is also prohibited from contacting his victims or being in the presence of anyone under 16 without supervision and was ordered to register as a sex offender for 10 years.
It was a plea, but Neurauter did not get a kiss.
That sentence and his presence on the sex offender registry may, depending on his choice of occupation and the sort of background checks to which he is subjected, follow him for the next decade of his life and beyond.
What he did get in exchange for his plea, to the usual howls of outrage, was a delayed sentence — he won’t begin serving his time until May, so that he might continue his studies at the University of Calgary.
Everyone seems furious about that.
The mother of the primary victim, who was 13 at the time, is upset that a side effect of the publication ban protecting her daughter’s identity is that some details of the story are also banned because they might serve to identify the girl.
As a result, the mother told reporter Bryan Passifiume of the Calgary Sun, the suggestion particularly on social media has been that her daughter was a willing participant, where in fact, the mother says, the girl had looked up to Neurauter, who was a big-brother type of figure to her.
The background, as best it can be described given the constraints of the pub ban, is roughly this: Neurauter was a wheel in their small city of Kamloops and she was a kid. They met a couple of times, with no sexual intercourse but sexual contact, and it culminated in the girl send- ing him pornographic images.
At some point, she stopped sending them and he allegedly threatened her with exposure, at which point, one of her friends (the second victim, who was then 14) began sending him pornographic pictures of herself, allegedly to distract Neurauter.
( The logic of that escapes me, but see earlier reference to young people being stupid and clueless.)
In any case, the mother of the second girl found the conversations on her daughter’s phone, and then the first mother learned of what had gone on and they went to police.
The mother of the first girl has complained publicly that the case was often delayed for Neurauter’s convenience and that the entire kit and caboodle was run to suit his hockey or school schedule; Neurauter’s parents, in a statement sent to reporters, dispute that, and say that at no time was the case adjusted to suit him.
In fact, they pointed out, Neurauter hasn’t played junior hockey since 2015, though a September 2016 Kamloops This Week story noted that Neurauter’s arraignment was delayed for two weeks because he was away at a hockey camp. So perhaps he was still hoping to get on with a team. Such dreams die hard.
The decision isn’t online, and the name of the judge in the case, or what he said about why he was delaying Neurauter’s sentence, hasn’t been reported that I could find.
But I would have done the same thing.
Aside from satisfying the mob baying for Neurauter’s blood ( as it bays reflexively of late for the blood of all men and boys, most of them merely accused of sexual misconduct), disrupting his term at university would have done no good. Jail does no good, period. And utterly flattening a young man with no previous criminal record is neither necessary nor right nor the purpose of punishment.
Let him finish his semester, then serve his time and attempt to make a life for himself. Let the girls feel vindicated and that they saw justice. And let them all stay off Snapchat, Twitter, etc. until they are old enough, which, if the adults of the world give any clue, may be never.