A man who spent 27 years in prison before he was found to have been wrongfully convicted has been ordered by a British Columbia Supreme Court judge to pay $375,000 each to five women who sued him for sexual assault.
Ivan Henry was convicted of 10 counts of sexual assault in 1983, but he was released when the B.C. Court of Appeal acquitted him in 2010 after determining he had been wrongfully convicted.
Henry represented himself at his trial in 1983, and he was given an indefinite sentence as a dangerous offender, but he was released and later awarded $8 million in his own civil lawsuit against the City of Vancouver and the provincial and federal governments.Â
Five women later filed a civil lawsuit against Henry, maintaining that despite the convictions being overturned, he was the man who sexually assaulted them in their Vancouver homes in the early 1980s.Â
The court ruling released today says Henry is liable for the sexual assaults because “it is more likely than not that he was their attacker and performed the sexual assaults … on a balance of probabilities.”Â
Justice Miriam Gropper says in her ruling that she doesn’t disagree with the findings of the court that acquitted Henry, noting that he should not have been convicted nor spent any time in jail.Â
