A man who sexually assaulted eight randomly chosen women from the streets of Montreal wants to serve his prison sentence from the comfort of his home.
Sobhi Akra, 39, surprised all of his victims from behind while some were wearing earphones. He grabbed their breasts or their genitals. The assaults were committed between October 2017 and November 2018.
The man, for example, slipped his hand under the skirt of the school uniform of a 17-year-old girl who was going to school. He also touched a woman’s buttocks and genitals saying, “You’re so sexy, I want to please you.” He assaulted a victim waiting for the train on a station platform and a woman returning from the gym. Two of the victims are minors. Each time, the man fled running after the attacks.
Sobhi Akra pleaded guilty in January 2022 to five counts of sexual assault and three counts of attempted sexual assault, but the man is still awaiting sentencing. The Crown demanded 22 months in detention last fall. The defense instead asked for six months incarceration so as not to harm the man’s immigration application and thus avoid him being deported to his country of origin, Lebanon.
However, Judge Alexandre St-Onge on Tuesday asked the two parties to comment on Bill C-5, adopted last June. This federal law makes it possible to impose a prison sentence at home on a sexual aggressor, in particular.
Sobhi Akra is already eligible for a suspended sentence, but his lawyer Me Réginal Victorin jumped at the chance to encourage the judge to rule in favor of this option. “What C-5 changes, in my opinion, is that the conditional sentence is no longer an exceptional measure. It must be encouraged, ”he pleaded at the Montreal courthouse. An interpreter translated each of the words of the lawyers and the judge into Arabic for Sohbi Akra.
“The legislator will encourage the suspended sentence (house arrest) because it is a measure that encourages recovery,” added Ms.e Victorin.
Me Carolyne Paquin rather hammered that the sentence must be proportional to the seriousness of the crimes. She also asserted that the sentence must preserve the bond of trust between the public and the justice system. ” [On parle de] someone who, over a period of a year, carried out intrusive actions with regard to eight vulnerable women, who did not ask that the gentleman commit such acts on their person”, has she said to the judge.
“We were asking for 22 months of detention,” said Mr.e Paquin to reporters as he leaves court. Passing Bill C-5 changes nothing for us. We keep the position that we had already formulated in court. »
The judge will deliver his decision at the beginning of April.
Federal Justice Minister David Lametti had to defend Bill C-5 just two weeks ago after a sex offender was sentenced to 20 months in prison to be served in the community, at the Montreal courthouse.
Jonathan Gravel, 42, penetrated a woman in the anus without warning despite her cries of refusal, in 2014. The man was convicted in 2018, but he stretched the legal remedies. If he had received his sentence a little earlier, before Bill C-5 was passed, he would not have been eligible for house arrest.
Remember that conditional sentences for sexual assault were abolished in 2007 by the Conservatives.