Canadian man on house arrest for sexual assaulting sister-in-law now to serve 33 months in prison
A B.C. man originally given house arrest after admitting to drugging, sexually assaulting and taking nude photos of his blacked out sister-in-law will now spend time in a federal prison.
So ruled an appeals court judge, who overturned a provincial court decision from earlier this year that allowed Fort St. John veterinarian Justin Donald Sewell to serve his 33-month conditional sentence concurrently at home.
In a ruling supported by two of her peers, appeals court justice Lisa Warren said the sentencing judge made an error in principle by failing to take into account the seriousness of the voyeurism charges, which didn’t arise out of the same incident.
“In imposing concurrent sentences, the judge erred in failing to consider the distinct legal interests violated by the voyeurism offences and the fact that one of the voyeurism offences arose from a different incident from that underlying the sexual assault and the other voyeurism offence,” wrote Warren in a decision published this week.
In 2007, the victim, then 20 years old, moved in with her older sister and her husband, Sewell, whom she first met in 1997, when she was 10 or 11, and had come to see “as an older brother,” the provincial court learned during proceedings.
That June, with his wife and four children out of town, Sewell, on the pretense of offering his sister-in-law a “safe environment for (her) to get drunk for the first time,” proceeded to spike her drink with drugs.
Once incapacitated, he stripped her bare, pleasured himself and then got naked and pressed his body against hers. He also took about 30 photos of her naked, including one with his genitalia “near her face.”
The drugs and alcohol left the victim unable to recall precisely what Sewell had done, but she did distinctly remember awakening to him taking off her clothing and knowing “something terribly wrong had occurred.”
While the victim, who did not know of the photos, moved away for school that September, the images remained on Sewell’s work computer but were deleted after one of his staff members inadvertently saw them.
The assault remained a secret until 2014, when one of the victim’s other sisters learned of the photos, resulting in a “fracture” of the family as the girls’ parents and Sewell’s wife sided with him at the time.
“There is no question that the respondent’s sexual assault of (the victim) was an extremely grave violation of her bodily autonomy, sexual integrity, and dignity that caused her profound and ongoing emotional and psychological harm,” the decision reads.
Five years later, Sewell’s wife would learn from the woman he was having an affair with, one of his veterinarian colleagues, that he had admitted to the drugging and the photos — but not the sexual assault — in 2014.
With the family torn asunder, the victim received, but never responded to, repeated emails from Sewell offering an opportunity to talk over the next few years, all of which were absent “admissions of guilt or wrongdoing.”
After a July 2019 email “indicated he would support her decision” to come forward, and upon learning of his 2014 admission to his extramarital partner, the victim contacted the RCMP.
Two years into the investigation, the victim agreed to be part of a plan to get Sewell to confess to the sexual assault at a meeting in Vancouver while he was being recorded.
He did so in October 2021, admitting that he also took photos “of her from outside her bedroom window” on another occasion.
Sewell was formally charged with one count of sexual assault and two counts of voyeurism in April 2022. He pleaded guilty to charges in November of that year.
At sentencing this April, the Crown sought a term of four years and six months, along with placement on Canada’s sex offender registry. Sewell’s defence asked for “a cumulative sentence of two years less a day” in the form of a conditional sentence.
“Ultimately, the judge concluded that the sentences would be concurrent because consecutive sentences ‘would effectively undo the value of the guilty plea by creating an unduly long and harsh sentence’,” Warren wrote.
In its appeal, the Crown argued that the judge overstated the impact of Sewell’s confession and “failed to properly weigh this mitigating factor against the elevated gravity of the respondent’s conduct and his significant moral culpability.”
It also asserted that allowing individuals convicted of voyeurism offences to serve concurrent sentences fails “to recognize the distinct harm caused” and that doing so just to preserve the option of a conditional sentence is an error in principle.
Warren didn’t accept the first two arguments, but she conceded that the judge erred in allowing Sewell to serve out his sentences simultaneously by not considering the relevant factors.
“Specifically, the judge failed to consider the invasions of (the victim’s) privacy interests caused by the voyeurism offences, as distinct from the invasion of her bodily integrity caused by the sexual assault.”
As such, Warren deemed a 33-month sentence (less one day) proportionate and “far from unduly long and harsh.”
Sewell’s sentences are retroactive to his initial sentencing earlier this year.
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