Rapist back in jail over drug binge, job in strip club

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/04/2009 (6376 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A high-risk Winnipeg sex offender is headed back to jail after he celebrated the end of a lengthy prison sentence by getting a job at a local strip bar and going on a drug binge.

Joel Barnabe was convicted Friday of breaching his long-term offender (LTO) designation, which required him to follow court-ordered conditions for 10 years. He was rearrested in mid-December, only weeks after his seven-and-a-half-year sentence for raping three young Winnipeg women had fully expired.

A urine test found traces of cocaine and marijuana in his system, and justice officials were stunned to learn Barnabe was working as a bouncer at Teaser’s and living upstairs in the Chalet Hotel that houses the cabaret.

Barnabe, 35, has a lengthy criminal history and cites drugs and alcohol as triggers for his behaviour. By placing himself in an environment filled with scantily-clad women, booze and likely drugs, Barnabe was walking on dangerous ground, Crown attorney Dave Mann told court.

"He was unable to grasp the inappropriateness of this deceptive behaviour," Mann said.

Justice officials decided that Barnabe was "no longer manageable in the community" and charged him with breaching his LTO.

Barnabe has spent the past four months in custody, for which he got pre-trial credit of six months Friday. Provincial court Judge Theodore Lismer then sentenced him to six more months behind bars. The Crown had been seeking another year of jail.

Barnabe was arrested in 2003 following a violent sexual assault on a sex-trade worker in the North End. Police got a sample of his DNA and sent it to the RCMP lab for comparison with DNA from a similar unsolved attack on another sex-trade worker nearly a year earlier. The lab results linked Barnabe to the 2002 assault, along with another sexual assault in September 2001 in the downtown area. The victim in that case had been returning home from a party when she was randomly attacked by Barnabe.

He was sentenced in November 2005 to three years in prison, in addition to the double-time equivalent of four-and-a-half years of time already served. His sentence expired in November 2008.

www.mikeoncrime.com