At the High Court in Kingstown, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, a 39-year-old father was handed a total custodial sentence exceeding 39 years on Monday by Justice Rickie Burnett, after a unanimous jury found him guilty of two counts of rape against his biological daughter and one count of attempted rape, which the 15-year-old victim secretly recorded to gather evidence of the abuse.
The string of offences unfolded over an eight-month stretch between late 2020 and mid-2021. The first documented assault took place on an unspecified night between November 2020 and January 2021, when the 14-year-old victim opened the family home door for her returning father. After greeting her with a seemingly affectionate head rub, the man later lured her close under the pretext of giving her money, before sexually assaulting her: he forcibly penetrated her, causing her to bleed as she screamed and begged him to stop, before handing over the pretense of cash once the attack ended. A second rape occurred between March 31 and May 1 of 2021, when the man drove his daughter to a local secluded beach, undressed her, and assaulted her in his vehicle’s passenger seat.
The third, attempted rape offence took place on July 6, 2021, shortly after the girl turned 15. When she approached her father to collect a meal he had promised her, he instead drove her to a remote area adjacent to a local school, put on a condom, and began assaulting her. Unbeknownst to him, the teen had activated a recording device to capture the interaction, documenting her cries and explicit objections to his abuse. The recording captured the moment the man finally stopped his attack, removing the condom when she resisted fiercely. The victim later shared the full audio footage with trusted contacts, which triggered an immediate police investigation that led to the man’s arrest and formal charging on all three sexual offence counts.
During the sentencing hearing, Justice Burnett emphasized that the case represented the most severe possible breach of parental trust, noting that the young survivor had sustained profound, long-term psychological trauma at the hands of the person who was legally and morally obligated to protect her. The judge noted that local public sentiment was overwhelmingly condemnatory of the father’s actions, referencing historical community sanctions including public shaming rituals once used to punish such egregious betrayals, before stating that the formal judicial system now bore the duty to deliver a proportional, deterrent sentence.
In calculating the custodial terms, Justice Burnett noted that the maximum statutory penalty for each count of rape in the jurisdiction is either life imprisonment or 30 years behind bars. He set a neutral 15-year starting point for each rape count, representing 50% of the 30-year maximum, before weighing competing factors: aggravating elements included the extreme vulnerability of the minor victim and that full penetration and ejaculation occurred during both assaults, while mitigating points included the absence of excessive physical violence beyond that inherent to the sexual offences, and the defendant’s previously clean criminal record. Since the aggravating and mitigating factors were equally weighted, no adjustment was made to the base 15-year term. As the man refused to enter a guilty plea and denied all offences through the trial, he was not eligible for a standard sentence reduction for early guilty pleas, but the court awarded him mandatory credit of three months and 26 days for the time he had already spent in pre-sentencing remand. This brought the final sentence for each of the two rape counts to 14 years, 8 months and 5 days, ordered to be served consecutively.
For the attempted rape count, Justice Burnett again set a 15-year base starting point, citing the victim’s ongoing severe psychological harm, the father’s premeditation of the assault, and her status as a minor. After balancing equivalent aggravating and mitigating factors, and applying the same remand credit, the judge reduced the adjusted 14-year, 8-month, 5-day term down to 10 years to avoid a disproportionately harsh sentence that would eliminate any reasonable path to rehabilitation for the defendant, resulting in a final 9 year, 8 month and 5 day sentence for the attempted rape charge, also ordered to run consecutively to the two rape terms. In addition to the total cumulative prison term of over 39 years, the court issued a formal order requiring the man to complete 10 years of mandatory specialized counselling upon his eventual release from custody.
Man whose daughter recorded him trying to rape her gets 39 years
