A provincial court judge in Prince George refused Monday, Dec. 30 to hear an application to convert a man’s house arrest sentence to a curfew.
Defence lawyer Liam Cooper and Crown prosecutor Anne Baines went before Judge Cassandra Malfair, seeking to vary 33-year-old Tyler Ian Curtis’s conditional sentence.
In September 2023, Judge Peter McDermick ordered Curtis to serve two years of home confinement and then three years probation for dangerous operation of a motor vehicle causing death.
Baines said Curtis’s lawyer originally sought both a change to a nightly curfew and an end to the required electronic monitoring.
“My friend and I have had discussions,” Baines said. “We’re not removing the electronic monitoring part, but we are proposing that condition four, which is the house arrest condition, be changed to be a curfew condition that he has to be in his residence from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m. daily.”
Malfair, however, said that was too much to ask her and told Cooper and Baines to make the application to McDermick, the sentencing judge. Malfair said the conditional sentence of house arrest is a form of jail within the community meant to express deterrence and denunciation. It is different from a probation order, she said.
“I can't go back and retroactively re-evaluate Judge McDermick’s principles of sentencing, what went into his thought in terms of restricting Mr. Curtis's liberty in order to give him a jail sentence,” Malfair said. “If he was in jail, we couldn't come back now and say we want to shorten his jail sentence.”
Curtis was the driver in a Foothills Boulevard rollover crash on Jan. 14, 2021 that killed his passenger and longtime friend, James Lindsay, 29. Curtis was supposed to be serving a 90-day driving ban for impaired driving, but was driving with a blood alcohol level of 0.179.
Curtis’s sentence variation application will now be heard Feb. 21, 2025.
Crown originally asked McDermick to sentence Curtis to two years in jail plus two years probation and a five-year driving ban. McDermick, however, opted for the defence request of the two-year conditional sentence order, with an electronic monitoring device, three years probation and five-year driving ban.
At the July 2023 sentencing hearing, Lindsay’s mother, Donna Pike, urged McDermick to be lenient.
“I don't think James would want him in jail,” Pike told the court. “I don't think it would serve him any good to tear his family apart.”
Curtis had no prior record and had pleaded guilty.
Curtis’s house arrest conditions allow him to leave his residence twice a week for two hours, as well as for work and for a medical emergency. McDermick also ordered him to complete 100 hours of community service work within the first six months.
With files from Mark Nielsen
