A BC Supreme Court judge ruled March 13 in Quesnel that while a 46-year-old man was guilty of bad decision making, but he was not guilty of child abduction.
Justice Anita Chan acquitted Jason Adam Penner of the charges of abduction of a person under 14 and abduction of a person under 16 because the Crown failed to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt.
Penner was charged after Quesnel RCMP investigated a report of a 10-year-old boy going missing on July 21, 2022.
“The evidence does not show that Mr. Penner tried to do anything to take (the child), to entice him away, to detain or conceal him,” Chan said in her oral ruling.
During the trial, the boy’s mother testified that her son had a 6 p.m. curfew, but he did not return on time on July 21, 2022, causing her to worry. She printed a photo of her son and showed it to people on the street as she searched for him through the night. He was found safe and returned to his parents.
The mother testified that she did not know Penner and did not give him permission to take her son.
The judge said that “a fair view of the evidence” is that the boy and Penner randomly met outside a Circle K store on July 20, 2022 and engaged in conversation about rare hockey cards before Penner invited the boy to his house so he could show him some of those items.
When the boy left for home, Penner, who was planning a garage sale, asked him to come back the next day to look at some more hockey cards.
“There's no evidence that Mr. Penner did anything more than that,” Chan said.
Chan said while the Crown emphasized the “enticement of candy, ice cream and a garage sale,” she did not find that Penner intended those to be enticements for the boy to go to his home on July 21.
“Considering the statements made by Mr. Penner that he was told by (the boy) that he had his parents’ permission to be there and that (the boy) could have left at any time — with the totality of the evidence — the court is not convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Penner intended to abduct (the boy),” Chan said.
“That is not to say Mr. Penner bears no blame for the incident. In my view, Mr. Penner's decision to allow (him) to stay overnight was a very poor one. However, I do not find, on the circumstances of this case, that this poor decision rises to the level of criminal responsibility.”
