Last Updated: 8th January 2010, 8:19pm
A judge convicted an orderly of groping an emergency room patient’s breast, calling the man’s insistence he never noticed the attractive, scantily clad blonde “virtually impossible.”
Judge Robert Fournier convicted Tena Tesso, 36, of sexual assault, concluding his “evasive” account of what happened on Aug. 17, 2008, was simply “incredible.”
The 24-year-old complainant, meanwhile, was “as honest and frank as the day is long.”
Fournier said it was obvious from the trial’s start when she easily picked Tesso from a crowd of similar-looking black men.
The tactic “blew right up in his face,” Fournier said.
The woman went straight from her waitressing job to the emergency room at the General hospital with abdominal pain at about 3 a.m.
Tesso ogled her in the waiting room then came into her exam room five times, offering her blankets because she was cold in a miniskirt and tank top.
She thanked Tesso but became uncomfortable when he asked if she had a boyfriend, brushed her buttocks as he changed the sheets beneath her — which weren’t soiled — and looked up her skirt.
But she gave him the benefit of the doubt, thinking that Tesso — who wore white scrubs — was a foreign-trained doctor.
She knew she’d been right all along when he put his hand in her shirt, touched her breasts and called her “very beautiful.”
Testifying through an Ethiopian-dialect interpreter, Tesso denied doing anything but his job and said he didn’t even remember the woman until confronted by hospital officials.
He refused to agree with prosecutor Paul Attia that the woman was attractive, insisting he only found his wife beautiful.
Fournier scoffed at that.
“If 50 men, self-respecting, objective men, men who respect women, were to view (the woman), however briefly, they would conclude that she meets the standard of an attractive woman, at least in the city of Ottawa,” Fournier said.
The accused refused to admit it because he knew it would bolster her account he was showing her “undue attention,” Fournier argued.
“Here is a woman, relatively attractive, scantily dressed in a miniskirt, at times she is lying on the bed, exposing a great deal of her leg,” Fournier said.
“This accused refuses to acknowledge he noticed that. In my view this is virtually impossible.”
Justice Fournier has a long history of tragic incompetence.
When he was a lawyer, he had trouble writing a will, as a lawyer, he had as law partners some of the most pathetic examples of the legal profession in Ontario.
Later, Justice Fournier would not hesitate to hold hearings with lawyers who were in fact h is former law partners. In his eyes, no conflict existed.
Fournier is a political animal, a sexist animal at that. His comments in court proceedings are frequently examples of blatant bias in favour of women and this is just one criminal decision that should be appealed.
Fournier has a long record for putting the most stupidest statements in his decisions, and if he was in any other profession, he would have been terminated long ago.
In the legal profession, Justice Robert N. Fournier is known as one of the most incompetent members of the legal profession who got to be a judge almost solely because he could speak French.
The Ontario Court of Justice will be much better off when this insult to the legal profession and justice turns up his toes and falls off his branch.