Alberta’s highest court has reduced convicted sex offender Paul Sheppard’s prison sentence from six years to just over two years.
The Dec. 21 Alberta Court of Appeal decision wasn’t unanimous with Justice Thomas Wakeling and Justice Kevin Feehan in favour, and Justice Michelle Crighton dissenting.
“A fit sentence is twenty-nine months’ imprisonment for sexual interference and eighteen months’ imprisonment for invitation to sexual touching, to be served consecutively,” ruled Wakeling.
in September 2021, following a trial in Wetaskiwin court, a jury found the 60-year-old former boy’s school headmaster guilty of sexual abuse of a student at Saint John’s School of Alberta during the 1993-94 school year. The victim was 12 and 13 at the time of the crimes.
The trial judge said there were about a dozen instances of sexual interference and invitation to sexual touching. Justice Wakeling, however, concluded the trial judge should have only found that there was one instance of each offence, and ruled that a six-year sentence was demonstrably unfit.
Wakeling also ruled that the trial judge erred finding there was “sexual violence,” saying “There is no ‘sexual violence’ crime.”
Saint John’s school was an Anglican-affiliated boarding school near Stony Plain. Sheppard taught there and at schools in several countries.
In 2015, he was found not guilty of indecently assaulting a 10-year-old student at a boarding school in the U. K.
The Appeal Court also ordered that Sheppard be on the Sex Offender registry for 20 years instead of for life that the trial judge had ordered.
