REGINA – A notorious residential school sex abuser has successfully had one of his convictions quashed, but Paul Leroux will nevertheless serve more jail time after an appeal court ruling Tuesday. Leroux, convicted in 2013 of 10 counts of abusing boys at Beauval Indian Residential School in northern Saskatchewan, had his sentence increased from three years to eight.
The increase came even though the court threw out one of his original convictions, saying the trial judge misconstrued it while arriving at a verdict.
“I find the palpable mischaracterization of this evidence is overriding in its effect with respect to this conviction,” wrote Justice Neal Caldwell of the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan.
The appellate judges, however, found the original sentence far insufficient for the crimes committed. Caldwell wrote it failed to consider the repeated nature of Leroux’s crimes and the vulnerability of his young victims.
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“The general context in which Mr. Leroux committed his offences lends significant gravity to them,” he wrote.
“The physical and sexual abuse that occurred at Indian residential schools is grimmer by reason of the exceptionally vulnerable nature of its victims and the utter imbalance of power as between the aboriginal victims of that abuse and their families, on the one hand, and the church, the state, and their respective agents – the latter of which usually includes the abuser – on the other.”
Leroux’s victims complained at the original sentencing that he hadn’t been given enough jail time. At the time of that sentencing, Leroux was 73.
It wasn’t his first set of convictions for sexual abuse at a residential school.
He was sentenced to 10 years in prison in 1998 for abusing 14 boys and young men at Grollier Hall, a residential school in Inuvik, Northwest Territories.
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