A Torbay man facing 10 charges — including sexually assaulting a woman, choking her and assaulting her with a hammer and a butter knife — was released from jail Wednesday after he was declared not guilty of most of them.
Grant Tapper, 31, had 10 charges against him stemming from incidents alleged to have happened on April 29 and May 4 of this year.
However, after a day-and-a-half trial, six of the charges were dismissed.
Tapper was acquitted of sexual assault after the woman told the court she had consented to sex with him, and he was acquitted of choking, forcible confinement and uttering threats charges as well.
He was also found not guilty of assaulting the woman with a hammer, after Judge Colin Flynn ruled the woman had been a willing participant in a game similar to the “knife game,” in which a person dangerously places their hand on a table and uses a sharp object to stab between the fingers.
“(She) was an active participant and one of her fingers was injured as a result,” Flynn said in dismissing the assault charge.
Flynn admitted he was “totally confused” as to what was going on when it came to the butter knife, but that “when one looks at the definition of assault or assault with a weapon, it doesn’t fit.”
Tapper was convicted of two counts of assaulting the woman. On April 29, he had been insulting her and was aggressive toward her, Flynn said, and pushed her on the floor, damaging her fingers so badly she required surgery. He then pushed her up against a fridge.
The woman called a taxi and when she went outside to wait for it, Tapper pushed her to the ground, where she suffered cuts to her knees, and kicked her.
On May 4, Flynn found Tapper had been drinking and pushing the woman around, "to the point where she felt she had no choice but to call the police."
Flynn found Tapper guilty of violating court orders in both incidents, namely to stay away from alcohol. The woman and two police officers testified Tapper had been drinking.
Tapper has been in custody since his arrest May 5 and has been banned from contact with the woman since that time. After similar submissions from Crown prosecutor Jessica Gallant and defence lawyer Michael Ralph for time served as an appropriate sentence, and a letter to the court from the complainant asking for the no-contact order to be lifted, Flynn sentenced Tapper to six months for the first assault, 51 concurrent days for the second, and 30 concurrent days for each of the court order breaches. With credit given for the time he has spent in custody, Tapper was released from prison on a two-year supervised probation order.
Flynn ordered Tapper to undergo counselling for domestic violence and alcohol abuse, banned him for life from carrying a firearm, and ordered him to provide a DNA sample. He varied the no-contact order to allow Tapper to contact the woman only if she invited him to do so.
Tapper has a significant criminal history, with convictions dating back to 2006, when he earned a 22-month jail term for aggravated assault. In 2009 he was sentenced to 23 months in jail for two counts of dangerous driving causing bodily harm; in 2010, he received 18 months for assaulting a fellow inmate at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary, and, later that year, a year for having intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in the woods in Torbay.
That same year, Tapper was sentenced to nine months in jail for assaulting a prison guard; in 2015 he served four months for an assault with a weapon conviction, and was also convicted of mischief charges that year and the next.
Twitter: @tara_bradbury
