The two former Victoriaville Tigres hockey players, Massimo Siciliano and Nicolas Daigle, are appealing their sentences of 30 and 32 months in prison for the sexual assault of a teenage girl.
In a motion filed Tuesday with the Quebec Court of Appeal, Massimo Siciliano’s lawyer, Mr.e Charles Levasseur, argues that the sentence imposed on his client just 24 hours earlier was “manifestly unsuitable”.
By failing to impose “a sentence which targeted only, solely and uniquely, the offence committed by the appellant”, Judge Thomas Jacques also failed to respect the “principle of individualisation of evidence”, the lawyer continued in his application.
He is therefore asking the Court of Appeal to overturn the judgment handed down on Monday and instead impose a “suspended prison sentence” on his client, which is what the defence had argued for from the outset, i.e. a sentence to be served in the community under conditions.
A request for release pending appeal was also made.
For his part, Nicolas Daigle’s lawyer, Mr.e Michel Lebrun confirmed by email that similar requests will be filed on Wednesday.
Massimo Siciliano and Nicolas Daigle were sentenced Monday to 30 and 32 months in prison respectively for the sexual assault of a teenage girl in a Quebec City hotel in June 2021, the evening of the Victoriaville Tigres’ victory in the QMJHL President’s Cup final.
The teenager, who cannot be named under a court order, was a 17-year-old hotel employee at the time.
The two young men, who pleaded guilty last October, thereby avoiding a last-minute trial, had instead hoped to receive a sentence to be served in the community.
However, the seriousness of their crime, “sexual assault on a collective scale […] of a vulnerable victim in a context of abuse of trust and objectification of a teenager,” Judge Thomas Jacques ruled in favor of a prison sentence.
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