A Whitehorse man who was sentenced to three years in prison for breaching a court order has had his sentence reduced by B.C.'s top court.

In a lengthy decision released this week, Justice Elizabeth Bennett of the B.C. Court of Appeal said giving Frank Ladue three years for using morphine and cocaine while at a halfway house in downtown Vancouver was excessive and ignored his troubled past.

"It was remarkable, really,” Ladue's lawyer, Hovan Patey, said Tuesday of Bennett's lengthy, precedent-setting decision.

Not only did the supreme court justice take into account all the background information on Ladue, but she did her own academic research into the history and effects of incarcerating First Nations people in Canada, Patey said.

Ultimately, the justice wrote a decision which will have an impact on the Supreme Court of Canada, Patey said.

Ladue was deemed a long-term offender by Yukon territorial court judge John Faulkner in 2003.

That designation was made after he was found guilty of breaking into a Ross River home and sexually assaulting a woman who was passed out on the living room floor.

During the trial, the woman told the court she awoke to find Ladue touching her breasts and attempting to unbutton her pants, but she was unable to resist, or even move due to her level of intoxication.

There were other people present, however, and they chased Ladue out of the house before anything else happened.

It was not the first time Ladue had committed such a crime.

In 1987 and again in 1997, Ladue raped two women who were unconscious, one in her bedroom and another who had passed out at a friend's house

In 1998, before he was charged with the previous year's crime, a young woman caught Ladue in her mother's bedroom, under very suspicious circumstances. He had covered the woman's head and shoulders with a sleeping bag and fled when her daughter confronted him.

As Faulkner noted in 2003, Ladue received sex offender treatment after his initial 1987 conviction, but "he continued to exhibit sexually deviant behaviour, including fantasies of offences of the kind that I have just been discussing.”

After the 2002 incident, a court-ordered psychiatric report said Ladue "was a sexual sadist and (suffered) from antisocial personality disorder.”

At the request of both the Crown prosecutor and Ladue's lawyer, Faulkner deemed him a long-term offender, meaning he would be under strict supervision for seven years after his release from a federal prison.

Faulkner said he hoped this would help Ladue get his drug and alcohol abuse under control, a hope which Ladue appeared to share.

He was released in 2006, but kept lapsing back into drug and alcohol use and returning to jail.

After his more recent release in 2009, he asked to be sent to Linkage House in Kamloops, B.C.

There, he would have support from a First Nations elder, and he would be far away from the temptations of city life. But due to an administrative delay, he was sent to Belkin House, a halfway house in downtown Vancouver.

"Mr. Ladue says he pleaded with his parole officer not to be sent to Belkin House due to the easy access to drugs, both in the residence and in the neighbourhood,” Justice Bennett noted in her recent decision.

"Mr. Ladue was immediately exposed to the very drugs he was forbidden to ingest. He tested positively on more than one occasion for morphine and cocaine.

"He admitted the use of the drugs and offered explanations for his conduct, but was somewhat deceitful with the staff. The staff determined that he should be suspended and he was charged with the offence of breaching his long-term supervision order.”

Shortly after, a B.C. provincial court judge sentenced Ladue to three years in prison for breaching his supervision order.

But that judge failed to take several things into account in sentencing, Bennett ruled this week.

She began by outlining the grim circumstances of Ladue's childhood:

"At the age of five years, (Ladue) was removed from his community and sent to residential school, where he suffered from physical, sexual, emotional, and spiritual abuse.

"He was not permitted to speak his language and was beaten if he did. He tells of serious sexual abuse inflicted on him by two employees at the school. He eventually received $16,000 compensation in 2007 but gave the money away to his family.”

He began drinking at the age of nine, and went from residential school to his grandparents' care to foster care to juvenile detention.

Once in the federal penitentiary system, Ladue graduated from alcohol to heroin, cocaine and morphine.

Although Ladue wants to return to his home community of Ross River, his family members have told the court they want him to be sober first, as they are.

Bennett went on to explore the reasons behind the Canadian law which says judges must take a person's First Nations ancestry into account in sentencing and consider "all available sanctions other than imprisonment.”

The amendment to the Criminal Code was made in 1996 in reaction to the gross overrepresentation of First Nations people in Canadian jails and prisons, Bennett noted, and prompted by one high-profile case – R v. Gladue.

"To be able to really highlight that in the wake of Gladue things have actually gotten worse. That is the part of the judgement that I would call remarkable,” Patey said.

In 2009, Bennett wrote, four per cent of Canadians identified as aboriginal, compared to 20 per cent of inmates.

She quoted one of the many reports that led to the sentencing law, which said: "... in Saskatchewan, prison has become for young native men, the promise of a just society which high school and college represent for the rest of us. Placed in an historical context, the prison has become for many young native people the contemporary equivalent of what the Indian residential school represented for their parents.”

The Yukon is no different .

Here, First Nations people make up about 25 per cent of the total population and between 75 and 80 per cent of the jail population. For women, that number is even higher, at 86 per cent in 2008.

In Ladue's case, Bennett said, the judge failed to properly consider the fact he is aboriginal and look for options other than prison.

"Mr. Ladue desires to succeed, as exhibited by his request not to be sent to Belkin House,” Bennett wrote.

"However, he is addicted to drugs and alcohol, which can directly be related to how he was treated as an aboriginal person. ... While the trial judge acknowledged his aboriginal heritage, she did not give it any tangible consideration when sentencing Mr. Ladue.

Secondly, Bennett ruled: "She treated Mr. Ladue as someone from whom the community required protection, reasoning that because his earlier violent offences (last committed in 2002) stemmed from his substance abuse, his use of intoxicants while in Belkin House put the public at risk.

"However ... there was nothing to indicate that he had come close to engaging in the violent sexual behaviour which attracted the long-term supervision order in the first place, either on this occasion or in any of his earlier breaches of the condition.”

She concluded that a sentence of three years was excessive, and instead sentenced him to one year, which he has already served while waiting for his appeal to be heard.

"I'm happy when a judgment like this serves not only my client, but the law as well,” Patey said, noting it will

likely be used as case law in an upcoming Supreme Court of Canada case which will deal with sentencing aboriginal offenders.