Punching your pregnant partner in the stomach is not a crime of “medium” seriousness: it is of high seriousness, of “higher level”, corrects the Court of Appeal by criticizing plus the trial judge for using “questionable formulations” in her judgment. The Court thus annuls the overly lenient sentence that the magistrate gave to a man who harassed and assaulted his partner for years: no prison at home for him. Instead, he will have to turn himself in to the prison authorities.
In a recent judgment, the Court of Appeal overturned the judgment on the sentence of an offender rendered by Judge Andrée St-Pierre of the Court of Quebec last July.
The couple lived together for 16 years. This was marked by humiliation and violence.
The judgment thus mentions degrading insults, threats and violent gestures: the man notably “punched her in the stomach while she was pregnant with their child, broke eggs on her head because she refused to make him lunch, spat in his face, sometimes with food in her mouth, punched him in the face so hard that she lost her nose piercing, threw lit cigarettes, including one in his hair “, threw a cup of boiling coffee and even tried to strangle her while she was rocking. It was the intervention of their minor daughter that put an end to the attack, it is noted. The victim left him that day.
Six years later, when she had a new partner, he began to harass and threaten her by text and phone. He tells her that he is not afraid of the law, and that this will not prevent him from “beating the complainant and her partner with a baseball bat.” » He adds that he “has nothing to lose, that he is ready for anything, that the complainant and her partner will never be peaceful with him. »
It was at this point that the 53-year-old man was arrested. He was charged with assault, criminal harassment and illegal possession of a firearm. The duty chose not to reveal his name so as not to identify his victim.
For everything he did during married life and after the breakup, Judge St-Pierre sentenced the man to 18 months in prison to be served in the community (that is to say at home) and to two years probation.
To arrive at this sentence, the magistrate took into account various aggravating factors, but when she assessed the seriousness of the actions committed, she decided that it “is neither very light nor very significant. […] Strangling her and punching her in the stomach, while she is pregnant, are more serious behaviors than, for example, pushing her, but are less serious than, for example, punching her fist. »
It is for this reason that Judge St-Pierre considers that the actions are “of average subjective seriousness.” »
The Court of Appeal rejects this qualification: “A clarification is necessary,” write its three judges. Violently and knowingly hitting a pregnant partner, especially in the stomach, in the wake of other acts of physical violence committed over a long period of time, raises the degree of subjective seriousness of the crime and the moral culpability of its perpetrator “at a higher level”, underlines she recalled that these were not “isolated gestures”.
She also corrected the judge who was of the opinion that the man could serve his sentence at home because he did not pose a risk to the community since his beatings had been carried out in a context of “domestic violence”. In other words, the offender does not pose a risk to citizens in general – just to his partner.
However, the criterion of “community security” does not only target a group: it can concern a single person, including the initial victim, corrects the Court of Appeal.
The three judges of the Court of Appeal believe that the trial judge committed another error: she did not adequately assess the man’s risk of reoffending by failing to consider that he had a history of matter of domestic violence.
For all these reasons, the Court of Appeal is of the opinion that a sentence to be served in the community is not appropriate in his case. She therefore imposed six months in prison (after deducting the time spent in detention before the judgment as well as the eight months already served at home) as well as two years of probation.