Sask. survivor of Whitmore abuse pushing for changes to dangerous offender criteria

A sexual assault survivor who was kidnapped and raped by Peter Whitmore over two days in 2006 is pushing for federal legislative changes to keep abusers in prison longer.

“Many other offenders have done equally grievous things as him and have gotten off for good behaviour and were released early,” Zach Miller said will speaking on Gormley.

In the summer of 2006, Whitmore kidnapped and sexually assaulted Miller, who then was 10 years old.

Now 23, Miller is working with a teenager in Manitoba, Christyne Caldwell, to get MPs in Ottawa to change the requirements for how judges can label criminals dangerous offenders. Such a designation allows for the option of keeping criminals in jail indefinitely.

Caldwell’s petition, which Miller supports, seeks to have sexual interference added to the definition of serious personal injury offences, which are the offences considered when courts look at designating an individual as a dangerous offender.

Right now, sexual interference is not included as part of the definition of serious personal injury offences.

Miller says that needs to change; a convict’s sexual interference charge is too vague as to indicate what they actually did.

The Criminal Code of Canada defines it in Section 151 as a person who “for a sexual purpose, touches, directly or indirectly, with a part of the body or with an object, any part of the body of a person under the age of 16 years.”

It carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years and a minimum sentence of one year.

“You don’t know if it was against a child, an adult, and you don’t really know the depths of that. So it makes it really hard to understand, especially for any of these people that we’re convicting,” Miller said.

In 1993 Whitmore was convicted of invitation to sexual touching and sexual interference; his crimes were against five different children. He was released after serving two-thirds of his prison sentence, originally set for 16 months.

After he was convicted for his 2006 abuse of Miller and a 14-year-old boy from Manitoba, Whitmore was given a life sentence as part of a plea deal. He has been eligible to apply for parole since 2015.

Whitmore now has a profile on the website Canadian Inmates Connect, a site where inmates can try to find pen pals.

“You look at my case with Peter Whitmore, and you count the eight or nine times he’s been arrested for basically the exact same thing that I went through. And yet it’s not really documented on his record,” Miller said.

He encouraged people who support the petition and the cause to sign it.

As of Monday morning, the petition has 1,204 validated signatures. It closes on May 19.