Five years for internet luring, child pornography

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This article was published 18/06/2021 (1657 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

While on probation for sexually assaulting a young girl, Patrick Sinclair lured another dozen teen girls online, pushing them to pose nude for him and perform sex acts.

This week, a judge sentenced the 27-year-old Manitoba man to five years in prison.

Sinclair pleaded guilty last year to internet luring, extortion, and making and distributing child pornography — a five-year long stream of crimes provincial court Judge Alain Huberdeau described as “shocking and chilling.”

Huberdeau rejected an eight-year sentence recommended by the Crown as too high, saying evidence Sinclair lived with intellectual disabilities and “deficits,” as well as his Indigenous background, “tempered” his moral culpability.

“I also find his (culpability) remains at a level which requires that a meaningful period of custody be imposed,” he said.

Huberdeau also cited the current pandemic as a factor in rejecting the higher sentence.

“Given that Manitoba appears to be the epicentre of the third wave of the pandemic, I also find it important to consider the effect of COVID-19 on Mr. Sinclair’s sentence,” Huberdeau said.

“There have been and continue to be documented outbreaks in the prison population,” resulting in the suspension of prison visits, access to counselling and programming and other services, he said. “The impacts of COVID have made prison life much more difficult for inmates.”

Sinclair was sentenced in October 2015 to two years supervised probation in connection to his molestation of a preteen girl. By that time, he had been luring children online for nearly 3 1/2 years, behaviour that would continue until his arrest in October 2017.

Sinclair contacted the victims, all but one of whom lived in the United States, through online chat groups before moving to Skype, where he secretly recorded them as they gave in to his sexual demands.

According to an agreed statement of facts provided to court, Sinclair threatened to post nude pictures of one victim online if she did not submit to his demand for more pictures, sending her a picture he had secretly taken of her, including all her social media contact information, to bolster his threat.

Sinclair made a similar threat to another victim, who contacted police in the U.S. The girl provided police with Sinclair’s first name and said he was from Winnipeg. Investigators ultimately traced his IP address to his rural Manitoba home.

Police seized Sinclair’s electronic devices, which were found to contain 80 pornographic images of the victims and 37 videos. Police were ultimately able to identify only four of the 12 girls, the youngest of whom was 13.

Court heard Sinclair has never held a job, and has lived a “reclusive” life in his foster parents’ rural Manitoba home.

“He’s never been incarcerated before and his disorders may make him more vulnerable to exploitation, while also presenting barriers to treatment while in custody,” Huberdeau said.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca