Court rules Fond du Lac man will keep dangerous offender label

That hearing took place in Melfort this summer in front of Provincial Court Judge Inez Cardinal, who said that given Piche’s lack of willingness to take responsibility for his own actions and continued offences, he should keep the label and the indeterminate jail sentence that goes with it.

Piche’s lengthy criminal history started when he was 21 and in the years since, he has been convicted 59 times, with 22 of the convictions involving violence.

Cardinal listed some of the more egregious offences in her written decision.

He was given fourt and a half years in jail for forcibly raping a La Loche mother who had given birth eight days previously. The attack tore open her episiotomy stitches.

Several months later, he attacked a woman he had first met at a social gathering that same evening, pushing her into an alley in Prince Albert and raping her.

He then threatened to kill her if she told anyone of the attack.

He refused to accept responsibility for his attacks and also refused to take sex offender treatment.

While in jail at the Prince Albert Correctional Centre, Piche punched another inmate about 20 times with no return punches from the victim and later spat and swore at nurses then told them he would find and kill them once he was released.

He also threatened to kill his former common-law partner and pressed a lit cigarette to her back. Another time, he bit her hand causing it to bleed because she was too slow passing him a cigarette.

After multiple offences, Piche was warned in 2010 that if he was found guilty of any more violence, he would face a possible dangerous offender hearing, which he said he understood.

He was also serving time in the federal jail and took some of the programming available, but not enough to warrant parol. The board noted in one assessment that he was indifferent to how his actions impacted other people.

The doctor who assessed Piche in 2013 noted he was angry and focused it on his childhood abusers at the Prince Albert residential school, the judicial system, his former spouse and his lawyer.

The doctor concluded that the ability of therapy to help Piche was limited, especially given his history of using inhalants for substance abuse, where the physical effects can be mitigated but not reversed.

In order for an application to have a person be declared a dangerous offender, the judge must be convinced that they have committed serious personal injury offences and that it is part of a larger pattern of behaviour. The designation is for offenders who have a high likelihood to re-offend and that the offender’s conduct is intractable.

In Piche’s case, Cardinal found all to be true.

Several options exist for sentencing dangerous offenders with the default sentence being indeterminate.

Piche’s lawyer asked for a fixed sentence of four to seven years in jail followed by a 10-year supervision order in the community.

Cardinal said that given his continued threats towards female prison staff along with inappropriate sexual behaviour and refusal to take part in sex offender programming, his risk to re-offend was too high.

The only hope that Piche will become less dangerous to the public and specifically any domestic partner is that as he ages, he is less likely to be violent. Normally, the risk starts to reduce at 60 years, but the process is individual.

AT 54, Cardinal found the odds that Piche would be safe to release from incarceration too high.

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susan.mcneil@pattisonmedia.com

by Susan McNeil

Court rules Fond du Lac man will keep dangerous offender label

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