When the final tally was done 19 days were all that was left to serve of the six-month sentence Timothy Sheppard was given in provincial court in Corner Brook on Wednesday afternoon.
The York Harbour man was sentenced to four months on a charge of break and enter into a vacant home in the community sometime between December 2016 and January 2017 and 30 days, to be served consecutively, on a breach of probation.
Sheppard, 47, entered guilty pleas to those two charges during a previous court appearance.
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He was also sentenced to 30 days each on a charge of common assault and a breach of probation from a Dec. 18, 2017 incident. Those sentences are to be served concurrent to one another, but consecutive to the other sentences.
Sheppard had originally been charged with sexual assault, however, after considering the evidence from Monday’s trial, Judge Kymil Howe convicted him of the lesser offence.
While she found the victim and witness to the incident believable, she was not satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt that Sheppard’s actions were such that they violated the sexual integrity of the complainant, which is a key element of a sexual assault offence.
Sheppard grabbed the victim, a girl under 18 at the time, by her shirt near the shoulders and tried to kiss her.
Sheppard, who has a lengthy criminal record that includes a conviction for rape, has been in custody for 107 days and that translated to 161 days credit. When those days were subtracted from the total sentence of 180 days the result was 19 days.
Howe also ordered that Sheppard be placed on probation for 12 months following the completion of his sentence, be subject to a DNA order and pay a total of $500 in victim fine surcharges.
Sheppard had also been set to go to facts and sentencing on three other charges, two counts of fraud and one count of possession of property obtained by crime, but that didn’t happen as he wants to change his guilty pleas on those charges to not guilty.
The Crown is not consenting to the change in plea. The lawyer representing him on those charges wasn’t present on Wednesday and they were set over to June 14 for a hearing on an application to change the pleas.
