A Nova Scotia Court of Appeal panel has reserved decision at a Halifax woman’s appeal of her convictions on five pimping-related charges involving a 16-year-old girl.
Renee Allison Webber, 45, was found guilty by a Nova Scotia Supreme Court jury in September 2018 on charges of trafficking a person under the age of 18, receiving material benefit from human trafficking, advertising sexual services, procuring a person under 18 to provide sexual services for consideration, and sexual exploitation.
The offences were allegedly committed over a period of four to six weeks in late 2015, mainly in the Halifax area but also during trips to Moncton, N.B., and Toronto.
Webber had earlier pleaded guilty to a charge of assault, for slapping the girl in the face shortly before she went to police in May 2016.
She was sentenced in January 2019 to four years in prison but was granted bail eight months later after filing an appeal of her convictions.
The appeal was heard Tuesday by a panel consisting of justices Duncan Beveridge, David Farrar and Carole Beaton.
Webber’s lawyer, Lee Seshagiri, argued that the trial judge, Justice Christa Brothers, erred in allowing the jury to hear evidence on the sexual exploitation charge. He said the Nova Scotia court had no jurisdiction to hear the charge because the sexual touching is alleged to have occurred in Moncton.
Seshagiri wants the Appeal Court to quash the sexual exploitation conviction and enter a stay of proceedings on the charge due to lack of jurisdiction. He also asked the appellate panel to quash the rest of the charges, which were possibly tainted by the New Brunswick evidence, and order a new trial before a judge alone.
In addition, Seshagiri said the trial judge erred in denying a defence motion to call evidence regarding an alleged sexual assault on the girl by Kyle Leslie Pellow, a Halifax man who was also charged in the case, and made numerous errors in her 200-page jury instructions, which he described as “excessively confusing, long and complicated.”
He claimed the instructions “should have been less complicated on some issues and more fulsome on others.”
Crown attorney Tim O’Leary told the appellate panel the trial judge was correct to find the Nova Scotia court had jurisdiction to hear the sexual exploitation charge. Although the sexual touching occurred in Moncton, he said the exploitative relationship started in Nova Scotia.
If the Appeal Court disagrees with the Crown’s submissions and stays the exploitation charge, O’Leary said it shouldn’t order a new trial on the rest of the charges. He said those charges were “morally repugnant” on their own and might not have been prejudiced by the evidence regarding the sexual touching.
O’Leary conceded that Webber should get a new trial on the advertising charge because of an error in the judge’s instructions, but he insisted that her directions to the jury were otherwise adequate.
“The trial judge’s instructions could have been better; they could have been more concise,” he said. “But I think you could probably say that for almost any jury (instructions).
“The test isn’t whether the jury was perfectly instructed but whether, using a functional approach, was the jury adequately instructed to decide this case based on the law and the evidence? I submit it was.
“At the end of the day, this case essentially came down to credibility, and the appellant simply was not believable, in my submission.”
On Wednesday, the appellate panel will hear the Crown’s appeal of Webber’s four-year sentence. The Crown says the judge incorrectly struck down as unconstitutional the Criminal Code’s five-year mandatory minimum sentence for trafficking someone under the age of 18 and two-year minimum for receiving material benefit from human trafficking.
The prosecution had requested a sentence of at least six years for Webber.
Pellow, 31, pleaded guilty in Halifax provincial court in June 2018 to three charges – trafficking a person under 18, advertising sexual services and breaching a court order. He received a six-year prison sentence, but the judge deducted just over three years as remand credit.
