Man from British Columbia to be extradited to the USA for sexual assault

A man from British Columbia is to be extradited to the USA. If convicted, he faces a life sentence there. He is accused of repeatedly sexually abusing his stepdaughter. On Tuesday, he lost his appeal against the extradition order.

The defendant, identified in court documents as JL, had been wanted by Utah authorities for years after a warrant was issued for his arrest in June 2015.

The man is accused of repeatedly sexually abusing his stepdaughter from June 2012 to June 2014, when the girl was between 12 and 14 years old.

The crimes are said to have occurred in St. George, Utah, where JL lived with his stepdaughter and her mother, to whom he was married at the time.

According to court documents, the stepdaughter told her mother about the alleged abuse in June 2014, but the allegations were not reported to police until the following November.

The defendant left Utah the same day the allegations were reported to police, and U.S. authorities then accused him of “fled” to Canada to escape reprisals, according to affidavits submitted to the court.

JL denied that the move had anything to do with the allegations and said he had already planned to return to Canada that day because his marriage had failed.

He testified that he returned to Canada and, after travelling freely to several countries with his Canadian passport, settled with his parents in Sooke, BC, where he obtained a BC driver’s license.

His parents stated in court that police never contacted them to locate their son until a British Columbia Supreme Court judge issued a provisional arrest warrant for him and he voluntarily turned himself in to police in June 2020.

JL argued unsuccessfully that the five-year delay in requesting his extradition to the United States on charges violated fundamental rights principles under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Early last year, a British Columbia Supreme Court judge rejected his argument and ordered JL’s re-arrest after the federal justice minister granted the U.S. extradition request.

JL appealed the decision to British Columbia’s Supreme Court, arguing, first, that the delay in the extradition request was an abuse of process and, second, that the lengthy prison sentence he faced if convicted in the United States rather than Canada was unfair.

Justice Sunni Stromberg-Stein of the British Columbia Court of Appeal upheld the minister’s extradition order and found the claim that delaying the proceedings or threatening a long prison sentence violated Canadian legal principles to be without merit.

“The Minister concluded that the defendant’s likely U.S. sentence would be between 41.33 years and life imprisonment, compared to a likely sentence of six to nine years imprisonment in Canada,” Stromberg-Stein summarized her decision.

“The Minister concluded that the inequality was not so great as to suggest that surrender would be unjust or oppressive or would shock the Canadian conscience.”