Warning: This story contains disturbing details. Discretion is advised.
A man who committed a violent sexual assault against a stranger in her Halifax home in June 2018 has been declared a dangerous offender.
Sem Paul Obed pleaded guilty in January 2020 to charges of aggravated sexual assault, choking to overcome resistance, breaking and entering, and breaching the terms of a peace bond by consuming or possessing alcohol.
The 50-year-old, originally from Hopedale, N.L., has a criminal record going back decades.
On June 1, 2018, Obed broke into a woman’s apartment while she was in bed and sexually assaulted her for more than an hour, at points punching, strangling, and biting her, as well as dragging her around the apartment by her hair. The victim was left with a number of physical injuries and needed stitches to close a laceration on her left eyebrow.
The woman was living with Obed’s niece, who was out of the province at the time. It didn’t take long for police to arrest him because he identified himself to the victim as her roommate’s uncle.
In his written decision released Friday, Justice Robert W. Wright didn’t mince words in calling it “one of the most horrific sexual assaults ever to come before this court.”
Indeterminate sentence
While the Crown sought an indeterminate sentence for Obed, the defence wanted a 15- to 20-year sentence followed by a long-term supervision order for 10 years.
However, Wright said he “readily” found Obed represents a substantial risk to reoffend and expressed doubts that his risk can be managed in the community.
The judge said that Obed had an opportunity to address the court following closing submissions for the dangerous offender hearing, in which he displayed an “astonishing lack of insight” by saying the violent assault he committed wasn’t the victim’s fault.
“Even then, he did not express a willingness or commitment to rehabilitate himself and change his ways,” Wright found.
Obed was given an indeterminate sentence, but the judge said that doesn’t mean he’ll be in prison for the rest of his life.
Dangerous offenders given an indeterminate sentence remain under the jurisdiction of Correctional Services Canada for the rest of their lives, but they are eligible for full parole after seven years. They would then be eligible for a parole application every two years after that.
“Ultimately, an indeterminate sentence places rehabilitation in the hands of the offender,” Wright said.
“It will therefore be up to Mr. Obed to earn his eventual release into the community through successful programming of a high-intensity level over the next several years that will serve to rehabilitate his personal character traits and morality enough to enable a safe release plan.”
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Decades of offences
Obed committed his first sexual assault in 1985, at the age of 14, when he broke into the home of a 45-year-old woman and sexually assaulted her at knifepoint. He was sentenced to 18 months at a “Boy’s home” in Newfoundland.
He then committed another sexual assault at the age of 16 after breaking into a woman’s house and “beating her badly.” He was sentenced to 18 months of imprisonment for that offence.
After he was released, he left his hometown of Hopedale, N.L., and moved to St. John’s, “where he described falling into a consistent pattern of being released and reoffending.”
Obed’s first federal sentence came in 1993 after he was convicted for another sexual assault, attempted murder and property damage. He served his sentence in Dorchester Penitentiary from 1993 until 1999.
After that, he moved to Halifax, though he did spend some time living with his sister in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, but he returned to Halifax after that didn’t work out.
In 2011, he beat up a female bartender in Happy Valley-Goose Bay, earning himself another federal sentence, which he served at Dorchester until 2014.
Obed then returned to Halifax, where he lived in a shelter before moving to a bachelor’s apartment in Fairview in 2016. He worked part-time moving furniture and drank heavily up until he committed the most recent offence in June 2018.
‘Traumatic and tragic’ childhood
In his decision, Wright outlined the findings of the Gladue report, a pre-sentencing and bail hearing report that Canadian courts can request when they’re considering the sentence for an offender of Indigenous ancestry.
That report, authored by lawyer and Gladue writer Robin Thompson, outlined a “traumatic and tragic” childhood for Obed, who is of Inuit descent and attended a residential school.
“The report describes Mr. Obed’s lack of educational achievement, and by extension his lack of employment, as having been greatly impacted by attendance at a residential school, family disintegration, family violence, alcohol and abuse,” Wright said.
According to the report, Obed lived his entire life in poverty and lost the ability to speak his traditional language while at the residential school, which divided him from his parents.
His parents drank heavily, and Obed frequently witnessed his father beating his mother. He was also “introduced to sex at a young age,” and he and his siblings were sexually active by the age of 13.
“While these factors certainly do not excuse Mr. Obed’s many past criminal offences, they do provide some insight into why he developed the criminal deviant traits that he exhibited in the commission of these despicable predicate offences,” said Wright in his decision.
“His moral culpability for these offences nonetheless remains high.”
Wright’s decision also drew in evidence from Sarah Anala, an Inuit elder and liaison officer who worked as part of a case management team delivering programming at the Dorchester Penitentiary.
She worked with Obed during his two incarcerations there, and she described him as “a smart person but that he never had a chance in life because of the poor home environment he grew up in where alcoholism, violence and sexual assaults were the norm.”
“She said the Obed family went from a healthy family group environment to one of trauma, isolation and despair when his grandparents and their families were dislocated and dispossessed from their home and ancestral lands by government authorities in the 1950s,” Wright’s decision said.
“That dislocation resulted in exposure to racism and poverty which she said has impacted intergenerational trauma.”
While he was receptive to Anala during his first sentence, he became “disengaged” during his second, refusing to participate in programs.
A ‘hate-on’ for women
Dr. Grainne Neilson, a forensic psychiatrist who gave opinion evidence in this case, described Obed in a risk assessment report as posing “a very high risk of re-offending in a sexually violent manner.”
Over the course of several interviews, Obed described having a “hate-on for women” and said he has seen lots of violence towards women growing up.
“Maybe it’s genetic… I want to hurt and control them… it was something I learned over the years from my father,” he said. “The way I grew up it was normal to be violent towards women… I consider them to be sexual objects… they are someone to control.”
He was also quoted as saying that he “repeated what I saw growing up; offer them booze. Get them intoxicated. If they agree to have sex, good. If not, then force yourself on them.”
Neilson said that in his youth, Obed’s father would make him go out into the community, find victims and lure them back to his home. Obed would then watch his father physically and sexually assault them.
While she said Obed expressed a willingness to engage in further treatment plans while in prison, she said he didn’t appear to have had meaningful gains from those programs in the past.
“I recognize that Mr. Obed has stated … that he is prepared to make an effort to engage in correctional treatment plans but in the context of the evidence as a whole, that does not rise above the level of an expression of hope and mere hope is not enough,” Wright said.
What’s lacking, said the judge, is evidence that he’s truly motivated to make the “deep down personal changes needed for his own good that would lead to a safe release plan.”
“I have no hesitation in finding that Mr. Obed, by his past conduct, has shown a failure to control his sexual impulses and that if he so fails in the future … he is likely to cause injury, pain or other evil to other persons as a result of such failures,” Wright said.
“On this foremost statutory criteria, I find that Mr. Obed should be declared a dangerous offender.”
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