A disgraced former Vancouver police officer has failed to convince the B.C. Court of Appeal that a jail sentence imposed on him for kissing a 21-year-old woman who had been a witness in one of his sex-exploitation cases was “unduly harsh.”
The kiss happened in Burnaby, according to court documents.
Former longtime Vancouver police officer James Albert Stanley Fisher – then with the VPD’s counter exploitation unit – had worked with the woman for five years in an investigation that led to the conviction in 2014 of a notorious pimp whose treatment of the woman when she was a teenager had been “abusive, callous, and border(ing) on psychopathic,” according to a B.C. Court of Appeal ruling Wednesday.
In December 2015, the woman texted Fisher, and they agreed to meet.
After talking in his car for about 15 minutes in a Burnaby parking lot, they parted.
“As they were saying goodbye, he hugged her. He asked her for a goodnight kiss and then kissed her on the lips,” stated the ruling by Justice Nicole Garson.
That same year, Fisher also hugged and kissed a 17-year-old witness in another sex-exploitation investigation on three occasions, with some of the incidents lasting up to 10 minutes.
“She said that the incidents took her back to her experiences in the sex trade, where she learned that if someone did something for her, she would be expected to reciprocate with sex,” stated the ruling.
Fisher, 61, pleaded guilty to one count of sexual exploitation and two counts of breach of trust and was sentenced last August to eight months in jail for the breach of trust against the first woman, 12 months for the breach of trust against the teenager and 90 days for sexually exploiting her.
He was also sentenced to two years of probation.
'Saviour'
In his appeal, he argued the sentence for kissing the first woman was “disproportionate considering the gravity of the offence and his degree of responsibility.”
He also argued the sentencing judge hadn’t properly scrutinized that woman’s victim impact statement.
The woman had said “her life went downhill fast” and she relapsed after five years of being clean after the kiss, becoming depressed, negative and homeless.
Fisher argued the judge had put too much weight on those statements despite a judge in another case having found her to be a “completely unreliable witness.”
Garson disagreed.
“The appellant appears to take issue primarily with the part of the statement that describes (the woman’s) relapse into substance abuse and her two suicide attempts,” she wrote. “In my view, this part of the statement, while important, did not factor largely in the judge’s reasoning as to the appropriate sentence. Rather, he emphasized (the woman’s) history of victimization and the father-like relationship the appellant had with her.”
Garson also disagreed with the argument that eight months’ jail was an unreasonable sentence for “one brief consensual kiss.”
She said that argument ignored the context of the act and that the “kiss cannot be examined in a vacuum.”
“(Fisher) could be described as (the woman’s) saviour,” Garson said. “He supported her in improving her life, moving away from sex work, and getting off drugs. She had been abused in one way or another by most of the men in her life. She trusted and relied on the appellant, and so his betrayal of that trust by sexualizing their relationship was far more significant than the physical act of one kiss.”
