New information halts sex-assault trial
After successful appeal, Stirling W. Peterson, 57, being tried for second time on allegations he groped female co-worker at Fredericton car dealership in 2019-20
A former Fredericton resident whose conviction for sexual assault was overturned by the province’s top court earlier this year saw his second trial on the charge begin Friday.
But the case didn’t get before new information forced an adjournment in the middle of the complainant’s testimony.
Stirling W. Peterson, 57, of Niagara Falls, Ont., was in Fredericton provincial court Friday for trial on a summary charge of sexual assault, alleged to have occurred between Nov. 1, 2019, and April 30, 2020.
At the time, he was working as a salesman at Fredericton Hyundai on Hanwell Road.
Peterson had previously been convicted after his first provincial court trial on the charge, but in an appeal decision from the Court of King’s Bench on Feb. 27, a judge overturned it and ordered a new trial.
That new trial got underway Friday morning, and first on the witness stand was the complainant, whose identity is protected by a court-ordered publication ban.
The woman said she worked at the dealership for a time, and Peterson was there and was one of the business’s top salespeople.
The witness was a little fuzzy on the dates of her employment, at times stating she started working there in late 2020, and then indicating it was in late 2019.
She testified Peterson would leer at her often and make suggestive comments.
“Stirling would come to my desk… and he would behind my desk and he would put his arm on my shoulder,” the complainant said.
“He would comment on my clothing. He would ask me to pull down my shirt.”
She also saw him take photos of her chest, she said.
Touching her breast, grabbing her butt
The most problematic behaviour stemmed from two incidents in which he touched her, she said. Those allegations form the basis for the charge against Peterson.
“The first incident would’ve happened in the stairwell,” the woman said.
She was going down the stairs, she said, while Peterson was coming up. She noted the two sides of the stairwell were separated by a handrail.
“He reached across and swiped his hand across my breast,” the witness said, noting it happened in late 2019 or 2020.
She said as they passed each other, he cupped her breast and moved his hand across it, and he said nothing as he did so.
“No, he just smirked and continued to walk up to the sales floor,” the woman said, noting no one else was present when it happened.
She said she told a fellow employee - Jenny Hunter - about it, but not the same day.
But the second incident occurred in full view of two other dealership employees, the woman said. It was at the end of a work day, nearing 6 p.m., she said, and she was wiping down her desk.
“So I was bent over,” the witness said. “Stirling comes in from the [vehicle] bay area and grabs my butt aggressively.”
Then the defendant kept walking, she said, grinning all the while.
“I was in shock,” the woman said, noting two other workers - Will Werenka and Troy Stewart - saw what had happened.
One commented to her he couldn’t believe what he’d seen, she said, and Stewart, the service manager, ended up reporting the incident to Jon Brawn, the general manager.
The witness said she hadn’t wanted to lodge a complaint or inform management because she was still on probation at the business and was worried she could lose her job.
“I was warned that Stirling had a lot of pull,” she said.
That’s why she sent an email to Brawn downplaying the incident, the complainant said, but nevertheless, she was told the company wouldn’t tolerate such behaviour and said Peterson would be suspended without pay.
But that didn’t happen, she said, which prompted her to report the groping incidents to the Fredericton Police Force in June 2020.
“I went to the police because I felt I had no other choice,” she said.
New information
Crown prosecutor Geoffrey Hutchin concluded his direct examination of the witness, and the court took a recess before defence lawyer Edward Derrah’s cross-examination.
But the defence’s questioning of the witness didn’t proceed Friday.
When the trial reconvened, Hutchin told the court that during the break, new information came to his attention and he felt it was pertinent and had to be disclosed to the defence.
He asked for an adjournment so the parties could delve into it before continuing with the trial.
The nature of the new information wasn’t mentioned on the record.
Derrah said he was reluctant to agree to the adjournment, given the distance his client had travelled for the trial, but he said some time would be needed to investigate the new details.
Judge Cameron Gunn set the case over to Nov. 17 to schedule the trial continuation.
After his conviction in the first trial, Judge Natalie LeBlanc sentenced Peterson to a year of probation, and imposed orders for him to register as a sex offender for 10 years and to submit a DNA sample for inclusion in a criminal database.
King’s Bench Justice Terrence Morrison, in his decision on appeal earlier this year, found LeBlanc erred in reaching her decision.
He wrote she assessed the evidence and credibility of witnesses incorrectly, and she misconstrued some of the evidence.
One of the other Crown witnesses at trial testified about a third incident involving Peterson and the complainant, one that she hadn’t reported at all, either to police or in her testimony.
LeBlanc pointed to how Peterson reacted to the third incident - which never occurred - in arriving at her finding of guilt, Morrison wrote in his appeal decision, and that mistake tainted the validity of her decision.
That mistake and others led to “a miscarriage of justice in this case which warrants a new trial,” the appeal judge ruled.
Don MacPherson can be contacted at ftonindependent@gmail.com.