Yellowknife (Oct 25/06) - Yellowknife lawyer Charles McGee was sentenced to nine months in jail Monday for sexually abusing an eight-year-old girl in the early 1980s.

McGee was convicted in June of indecent assault, a charge that no longer exists in the Criminal Code.

Two police officers took the once prominent civil attorney into custody following the sentence.

This past Saturday, McGee completed a two year conditional sentence from a 2004 conviction for molesting two girls in 1974.

He was under house arrest for the first year of that sentence, followed by six months of curfew from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m., then six months of court-imposed conditions.

Though defence counsel argued for another conditional sentence to be served in the community, NWT Supreme Court Justice Lucien Beaulieu ruled before a packed courtroom that house arrest was not appropriate in this case.

"The community needs to know these crimes are being taken seriously," he said.

McGee's defence also submitted letters written on his behalf by friends and

colleagues, including prominent members of the community.

Justice Beaulieu dismissed the significance of these letters, to a muffled cheer from the victim's supporters.

"Sexual abuse occurs in private," he said. "It's wiser for the details of the offence to speak to the offender's moral blameworthiness than the opinions of those around him. (For many offenders) the very reputation he enjoyed in the community is the very instrument that shields him and allows him to go about his nefarious activities unimpeded."

Though McGee was not a lawyer at the time of the assault, the judge said he was still "a trusted member of the community."

Beaulieu also said that, contrary to the defence's characterization of the attack as an "isolated incident," the fact that McGee molested this victim seven to eight years after he abused the two girls from the previous case was evidence of an "ongoing pattern of behaviour."

The victim was a guest in McGee's home on the night of the assault.

After arranging that she would be sleeping alone, he visited her room three times, molesting her on each visit.

The girl then hid in a cubbyhole and eventually fled to another room where other girls were sleeping.

In a victim impact statement, she said she, like other victims of sexual abuse, has "severe trust issues."

She has become overprotective of her own children to the point that she will not even allow them to play in the front yard for fear a pedophile will prey upon them.

She no longer attends church because McGee is a member of the same congregation.

McGee, who was suspended from practising law following his first conviction, declined to speak before the sentence was handed down, and sat with his hands folded and his chin down as the sentence was read.

Crown prosecutor Dennis Claxton had asked the court for a three-year jail sentence.

In his submission, defence lawyer Robert Davidson recited a litany of cases from across Canada of sexual abuse of children where courts had imposed conditional sentences to be served in the community.

He also argued that, during his time under house arrest for his previous conviction, McGee and his family had suffered financial and emotional hardship. Davidson said McGee had become a "leper" in the community.

He argued this loss of reputation was consistent with sentencing aims of denouncing unlawful conduct and deterring the offender and others from committing a similar offence.

Justice Beaulieu said he gave a conditional sentence careful consideration.

But McGee's record, his planning to get the victim alone, the high level of intrusion upon the girl and the fact that she was under his supervision at the time made a jail term necessary.