“Horrifying”, “atrocious”, “revolting”, “odious”, “unforgivable”. Judge Manlio Del Negro was at a loss for adjectives to describe the seriousness of a father’s sexual assault on his eight-year-old daughter. The 50-year-old was sentenced Thursday to eight years in prison.
“To engage in vaginal and anal intercourse with an eight-nine-year-old girl amounts to one of the most degrading forms of sexual exploitation which is tantamount to a form of torturing torture. The criminal action denotes a worrying degree of perversion,” the judge ruled at the Montreal courthouse.
Despite these extremely harsh words, the magistrate did not accept the prosecution’s suggested sentence of 10 years in prison, calling it “slightly excessive”. The judge thus considered the offender’s “sincere” remorse, his therapeutic approach and his admission of guilt.
The 50-year-old father – who cannot be identified to protect his daughter – pleaded guilty last year to charges of incest and sexual assault. From 2013 to 2015, he took advantage of the absence of his wife, who worked at night, to sexually assault their youngest daughter on a dozen occasions.
“This man put me through hell,” his daughter, now 17, testified last December. The courageous teenager denounced her father in 2019, four years after the attacks.
“I was disgusted by the decision my father made. I was disgusted by my existence. I felt like an unwanted little girl who had been cast a curse,” the victim said.
Despite what she went through, she has since forgiven her father. The judge thus insisted on underlining the “calm, the intelligence and the dignity” of the victim, as well as his “strength” and his “courage”.
Among the many aggravating factors, Judge Del Negro noted the young age of the victim, a little girl “entirely dependent on her father”, the offender’s position of trust, the frequency and duration of the assaults and the act of anal penetration. , “a serious attack on the human dignity of the victim”.
“The Court cannot conceive of an act of greater moral culpability than that in which a parent sexually abuses his child. In particular when the abuse took place when the child was young and the abuse was repetitive and spread over several months, ”analyzed the judge.
The defence, represented by Me Jean-François Boudreau, was asking for the minimum sentence of five years in prison because of the accused’s “exemplary” rehabilitation.
However, for such a crime, the judge had to favor the principles of “denunciation and deterrence”. The magistrate also quotes on numerous occasions excerpts from the Friesen judgment, a phase decision of the Supreme Court, which toughened the penalties for child molesters.
Me Charles Doucet represented the Crown.
