SEX ASSAULT LAWSUIT
Former inmates sue province
The B.C. government’s “long-term, systemic misconduct” enabled the sexual assault of hundreds of prisoners by a single corrections officer over two decades, a lawsuit filed Tuesday in B.C. Supreme Court alleges.
The notice of civil claim, filed on behalf of 61 former Vancouver-area inmates who allege they were victims of sexual assault while incarcerated, names the attorney general of B.C. and a former jail guard, Roderic David MacDougall.
MacDougall, who was criminally convicted in 2000 of sexual assault and received a 3½-year sentence, is believed to be living in Burnaby.
The B.C. government has previously admitted liability for his misdeeds while he was a public employee. But there has never been, the new lawsuit states, any thorough “judicial scrutiny of the province’s own systemic misconduct, which facilitated the sexual assaults.”
The new court filings make public, for the first time, allegations that MacDougall’s fellow corrections officers believed MacDougall “was sexually misconducting himself with younger inmates, and these concerns were brought to management” as early as 1980 — 17 years and an unknown number of victims before MacDougall eventually quit his job in 1997.
When MacDougall resigned from B.C. Corrections, the new lawsuit alleges, he wrote in his resignation letter: “It was nice while it lasted.”
In the years before MacDougall’s resignation, various corrections officers and prisoners tried to raise alarms about him abusing younger inmates, the claim alleges, but the province breached its duties to the inmates “by putting its own interest, and the interest of Mr. MacDougall, ahead of the victims of Mr. MacDougall.”
The claim seeks a declaration that the province, through its “failure to properly investigate, prevent and report sexual assaults and to properly investigate and supervise Mr. McDougall” enabled hundreds of sexual assaults, and the government should be liable to the plaintiffs for damages for breach of their rights.
The province, by breaching its duties to the plaintiffs, violated their charter rights to life, liberty and security of person, and the right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment, the claim alleges, stating: “Being sexually assaulted by a correctional officer is simply not a part of an inmate’s sentence.”
The claim argues the need for “vindication and deterrence,” stating the government’s misconduct is “so egregious” that “an elevated damages award is necessary to ensure they are not repeated — to ensure that the province acts appropriately in the future.”
Since MacDougall’s resignation, about 200 men have filed civil claims alleging he sexually assaulted them while they were in various Vancouver-area provincial jails where he worked between 1976 and 1997, including the now-closed Oakalla prison in Burnaby. Some claimants have been awarded compensation by the B.C. Supreme Court.
While earlier lawsuits focused on MacDougall’s misconduct, the lawsuit filed this week seeks, for the first time, to establish the province’s direct liability in allowing the sex abuse to happen over a 21-year period, said Karim Ramji, the Vancouver lawyer behind this week’s claim.
In an earlier litigation representing two alleged victims, Ramji had set out to argue charter breaches. But lawyers representing the B.C. government argued earlier this year that charter damages should not be available in that case.
In May, a B.C. Supreme Court judge agreed with the government lawyers, and allowed their application to strike the portions of the claim dealing with charter breaches. In the May judgment, B.C. Supreme Court Justice David Masuhara noted that while those plaintiffs were not, at that time, pursuing a class-action lawsuit, “the submissions made by plaintiffs’ counsel in the hearing seem to reflect ideas that relate to such proceedings; particularly in respect to assessing and distributing damages.”
Ramji has appealed Masuhara’s May decision. In the meantime, he filed this “representative action” Tuesday, a type of legal claim similar to a class action, where a group of similar plaintiffs mount a joint legal claim against a common defendant. He said he expects more plaintiffs may come forward later.