CANADA
Nunatsiaq Online
JIM BELL
To meet the need for retribution, denunciation and general deterrence, child-molester ex-priest Eric Dejaeger should get a 25-year jail sentence, Crown prosecutor Doug Curliss said Jan. 21 in a sentencing submission held at the Nunavut Court of Justice in Iqaluit.
“In virtually every community he was in, he sexually assaulted somebody,” Curliss told Justice Robert Kilpatrick.
Kilpatrick found Dejaeger guilty this past September on 24 counts, mostly sex crimes against Inuit children committed in Igloolik between 1976 and 1982.
He also heard guilty pleas from Dejaeger on eight other charges, some of which involved police complaint first made in the early 1990s.
After two days of harrowing victim impact statements from Inuit adults who Dejaeger sexually abused and assaulted as children, Kilpatrick began hearing sentencing submissions from lawyers.
Curliss said there Dejaeger’s case presents numerous aggravating factors and no mitigating factors.
And that means that — within the constraints posed by case law and sentencing principles set out in the Criminal Code — the court should impose the highest possible sentence, Curliss said.
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