Reading between the lines of this story it would appear he raped this young woman which resulted in her “bleeding profusely”.
Defence had asked for unconditional discharge to allow him to serve in Afghanistan. Do we really want to export our sexual criminals to other countries?
What he did end up with was “18 months probation and a $1,500 fine, which will be paid to a community organization that assists sexual assault victims.”
Oh well no harm no foul, eh?
The Crown had requested a prison sentence of two years less a day.
At his sentencing, Boulet asked his victim and his family to forgive him.
The victim, who name is protected under the law, has maintained that if Boulet had said sorry earlier and had shown some respect after the incident, the situation wouldn’t have ended up in court.
The assault took place in June 2004, at a birthday party held at the victim’s family home. Boulet had drunk too much to drive and decided to spend the night at the house.
During the night, he sexually assaulted the 18-year old woman, who was too drunk to give consent. After the assault, Boulet reportedly asked the young woman, who was bleeding profusely, to not talk about what happened.
The Department of National Defence will have the final word on whether Boulet is allowed to stay in the Canadian Forces.
CBC
It’s somewhat dangerous to read between the lines though in this kind of case, isn’t it? Especially since we’re not reading between the lines of the full court transcript, but between the lines of a brief news report about the sentencing. After all, while the mention of bleeding certainly makes the assault sound MORE serious, the victim stating that she wouldn’t have filled a criminal complaint at all if he’d respectfully apologized makes it sound somewhat LESS serious. There’s also little information about just how drunk the convict was, not that his drunkeness is an excuse, but if he was extremely drunk at the time (the article just says he was “too drunk to drive”) I’d imagine that would be a mitigating factor in sentencing.
Always good to ask probing questions of course, but I’ll tend to trust the judge’s judgement, not knowing many specific details about the case myself.
Also, for what it’s worth, it seems certain that he’ll be kicked out of the military, so in addition to his sentence, his career (which he seems quite passionate about) is over too.
I was glad this (soon to be former) soldier wasn’t given a discharge to serve in Afghanistan. Especially so as this man was ALREADY in the military. I wonder (beyond this specific case) if I would feel the same way about someone being given a choice between a particular sentence and JOINING the military to pay their debt to society (I’ll have to mull that one over). But someone already in the military should probably never (IMHO) be given the option of, basically, returning to their job rather than serving some other sentence. Even if their job is in Afghanistan.
Then again, I suppose some who think the sentence too light may be wishing today that Boulet had recieved the unconditional discharge his lawyers sought, on the logic that a tour in Khandahar is a greater punishment than 18 months probation and a fine. Though I suppose, as Boulet WANTED to go to Afghanistan with his unit, this isn’t ENTIRELY true either.
A very strange and complicated case.
Well from the Globe & Mail
And I’m not surprised she would rather have not gone to court on the issue and wanted an apology. It is a terrible thing to imagine that something that has such an impact on your life has virtually none on your abuser.
The man who abused me as a child and numerous other youth, eventually lost his job as a fire fighter, a career he was passionate about, do you think that gives us any satisfaction or changes what happened?
I mean I hear what you are saying in that regard, but really it didn’t change anything he just went on to abuse more children after serving only 6 months. His abuses on others included rape and sodomy as well as child porn pics and he got six months.
Many who testified probably wouldn’t have if he had apologized, not because they weren’t scarred by what he did, but his admission of responsibility would have been more important than the six months he got.
April,
I just wanted to mention that my “somewhat” above in “somewhat less serious” probably didn’t quite convey my meaning as forcefully as I might have liked, so I want to just explicitly state that I certainly don’t think that a victim’s willingness (at any point) to take an apology over a court case in anyway diminishes the seriousness of the crime, or the perpetrators culpability or anything of the like. My point was really just that while it’s never a bad thing to question a sentence that seems “off” I just don’t feel I have enough details here to do much more than trust the judge (or read the transcript if I was REALLY bothered) in a case like this, and that I worry about too much “reading between the lines” when discussing this type of case.
Also, I believe somewhere I read that the judge did NOT consider the effect of a conviction on the convict’s career as a mitigating factor in sentencing, so I don’t want to leave the impression that the judge gave a lighter sentence to Boulet because his career is over. I just added that myself as a comment on the effect (such as it is) that this conviction will have on him.
I do wonder to what extent the extent of Boulet’s own drunkeness was taken into accout, either in the process of making the decision to convict, or as a mitigating factor in sentencing. There is obviously a point at which one is too drunk to legally consent to sexual relations; does anyone know if there is a point at which one is legally too drunk to form the intent necessary to commit a crime (I hasten to add that this is a GENERAL question, not related AT ALL to THIS case where the criminal has been convicted. I just wonder how such factors are considered generally).
I wonder, for example, how the court would deal with a (totally hypothetical, almost certainly never happen in reality) case in which two extremely drunk people each accused the other of sexual assault because they were both too drunk to legally give consent. How would a court decide who was the attacker and who was the vicitm (presuming for the sake of the hypothetical no further evidence such as medical evidence, etc…)? Anyone have any thoughts, or better yet knowledge of statutes, case law, or academic discussions touching on such a hypothetical? (which I hasten to reiterate is a HYPOTHETICAL, not AT ALL a comment on this particular case, where the guilty party has been convicted and sentenced for his crime).
Well the G&M story (link now fixed) shows this as the judges’ reasoning.
So presumably he felt there wasn’t enough evidence to suggest that he was drunk enough to not know what he was doing.
*as an aside, isn’t there a point where drunkenness interferes with “ability”
There was a woman convicted of rape in the Netherlands for giving a man a BJ after he was passed out. (actual accounts vary)
I’m pretty sure being drunk as an alibi for criminal behaviour is not accepted under any circumstance. Otherwise there would never be any Impaired Driving convictions.
I think you’re probably right April that drunkenness can never be used as an “alibi” for criminal behavior, though generally it would seem as though a case (NOT this case) of sexual assault where the act is an assault not because consent was withheld, but because the consent given is deemed to be legally moot, it being impossible for the victim to have legally given consent at all, even if they appeared to do so, seems to suggest the potential for the need for some exception, at least in theory.
There is clearly no point at which one could be excused for driving drunk because they were too drunk to know better. Even if one’s judgment is impaired to an extraordinary degree one must take responsibility for getting behind the wheel of that car. It’s an absolute. It is also, clearly, an absolute that no means no. No question. However (not speaking specifically of this case) it would seem that in some (hypothetical?) cases of “date rape” the issue is that once a victim is past a certain point of inebriation, “yes” means no too. It’s obvious to me that if the accused is sober, or at least not “drunk” (however we define that) that even here the lack of (for want of a better term) “informed consent” should still be pretty obvious (such seems to be the case above). I’m less certain though that someone who is ALSO drunk out of his or her mind should (can?) always be expected to know that “yes” legally still means no in a certain situation. (again, I emphasize that I’m speaking in generalities, not about this particular case).
You can’t get away with saying “I shouldn’t be charged with drunk driving, (or murder, or robbery etc… etc…)because I was too drunk to know better” because the decision to drive drunk, or steal, or kill is obviously wrong, always, and one shouldn’t need to be sober to make the choice not to do that. I’m not sure if a really drunk person is in quite the same position with regard to the question “should I, or should I not, have sex with this person who appears to be willing to have sex with me?”. Morally, yes, but LEGALLY? If you wake up the next morning after driving drunk (or killing someone, etc…) and remember the events of the night before, you know instantly that you have committed a crime. I can at least imagine a case in which a person wakes up the morning after having what they presumed was consensual sex and doesn’t even CONSIDER that any thing’s amiss until they are later charged.
It’s a largely academic discussion I think, since I certainly don’t think there are a lot of (maybe not any) real world cases of “date rape” that would fall within this narrow hypothetical. There are those, however, (we call them “nutjobs”) who absolutely rail against the supposed hypocrisy of consent being mitigated by intoxication while the guilt of failing to realize that the consent given was not legally binding is not. Even I think it’s (academically) interesting that one can be too drunk to consent to sexual relations, but apparently cannot be too drunk to form the intent to commit sexual assault (through a drunken failure to recognize the difference between consent, and “legal consent”).
The most interesting hypothetical, I think, is the case of two extremely drunk people who each charge the other with sexual assault because BOTH were too drunk to legally consent. I wonder how a law class would handle that scenario.
Did this guy’s legal team not consider the optics of sending convicted rapist to Afghanistan to win the hearts and minds of the people.