Earl Atlin has been found guilty, again.

Yukon Supreme Court Justice Leigh Gower convicted the 48-year-old this morning after deliberating for a month about evidence from the man's December trial.

It was Atlin's second time before the courts on the same charge of sexually assaulting a 10-year-old boy twice in as many weeks during December 1987 and January 1988.

Atlin's original conviction after a May 2002 jury trial was overturned on appeal and a new trial was ordered.

The Carcross man will be back in court Feb. 26 for his sentencing. He'd been given 12 months' jail and two years' probation for his first conviction.

Gower read aloud his written decision this morning. He rejected Atlin's own testimony and noted he found that nothing in the evidence from the victim and other witnesses raised a reasonable doubt for him that Atlin had committed the crime.

Some parts of Atlin's testimony, said Gower, were 'transparent attempts' to 'concoct a convenient alibi' or show he couldn't have been in Carcross or around the victim when he was accused of being so.

The victim, now in his mid-20s, told the court the first assault occurred at his father's house before Christmas 1987 after a drinking party. He said Atlin came into his bedroom and forced him to fondle the adult man's genitals as well as perform oral sex on him. The man did the same to him, the young man testified.

About two weeks later, a similar assault occurred after the then 10-year-old boy accompanied his father to the house where the boy believed Atlin was staying. As the boy's father got up to leave after sharing several drinks with Atlin, the accused told the boy to stay behind.

Once the father left, Atlin took the boy into a bedroom and assaulted him for about an hour.

Defence counsel 'quite properly questioned' why the boy would go to Atlin's home after the man had attacked him, said Gower.

'We are examining in retrospect the behaviour of a 10-year-old boy,' said Gower. He said it's understandable the boy would have felt safe going to Atlin's place with his father, and suggested the youngster didn't yet understand the full significance of what had happened to him a couple weeks before.

As to why the boy would have stayed behind, alone, with his assailant, Gower said it is not surprising the boy complied, comparing the youngster's slight stature to that of the grown man with bushy hair and a beard.

The Supreme Court judge noted two inconsistencies in the young man's testimony, and chalked up the confusion to the perceptions of a young boy.

When the Yukon Court of Appeal threw out Atlin's original conviction, the three-judge panel concluded that if the trial judge had the benefit of two Supreme Court of Canada decisions handed down after the trial was over, he wouldn't have let the jury hear 'similar fact evidence' against Atlin. Those rulings were made in the fall of 2002, while Atlin was tried in the spring.

The appeal judges noted the Supreme Court of Canada's warning against allowing similar fact evidence if there is a large gap in time between the different incidents alleged.

Courts have been accepting similar fact evidence in recent years even though it's not subject to charges or is not connected to the matters at trial.

The trial judge stressed to the jury in May 2002 that they weren't to use a second man's testimony to determine whether Atlin is the type of person to commit these sorts of offences, but to help them decide whether the complainant is credible.

Another man besides the complainant testified that he too had been sexually assaulted by Atlin when he was a boy. Charges were never laid in that case and the man had never gone to police about his claims until he was approached by the RCMP in late 2001 during their investigation.

That man said he was assaulted in the early 1970s, while the complainant whose accusation was tried in court testified Atlin molested him in late 1987.