Lisa Scott
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Nov 21/05) - Three men have been sent to prison for three years each, 30 years after a gang rape in Lutsel K'e.

Family and friends of Antoine Michel, Noel Michel and Raymond Marlowe filled the courtroom to hear Justice Virginia Schuler's sentence this past Tuesday.

In her ruling, Schuler said she believed the story of the victim, now 44, about being dragged back to a house in the East Arm community and being raped, first by Noel Michel, then by eight other men, including Antoine Michel and Marlowe.

Antoine Michel was 22 at the time, while his brother Noel was 16 and Marlowe was 13 years old. All charges were heard in adult court.

"This was a brutal, demeaning attack on a defenceless girl," Schuler told the court.

"The offence is a very grave one."

Crown lawyer Steven Hinkley asked for a jail sentence from four to six years in penitentiary for each man, while counsel for the defendants asked for conditional sentences to be served in the community.

If the case had gone to trial when it happened, the maximum sentence for rape was life in prison. Today, the charge falls under sexual assault and carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.

Schuler called her decision a "balance" between Crown and defence counsel.

The judge denied the prosecutor's request to put Antoine Michel and Raymond Marlowe on the national sex offender registry.

A jury found the men guilty back in September, a year after the first trial in the case ended in a hung jury.

During the trial, the victim recalled the August 1975 rape and how she fled the community soon after. She now lives in Edmonton.

"I just wanted to die. I wished that they would kill me," she said.

She recounted a life of abusing drugs and alcohol that followed the rape in her testimony.

The woman wasn't in the courtroom for the sentencing.