A North Vancouver man who chatted up a 13 yearold U.S. girl online, telling her he would either marry or adopt her, has been handed a 12-month conditional sentence, including six months of house arrest.
Judge Carol Baird Ellan of the North Vancouver provincial court handed the sentence to Corland Embley, 46, after Embley pled guilty to a charge of child Internet luring.
In handing down the sentence, the judge noted the case was very unusual. Embley didn't appear to have a sexual motive in contacting the girl, was immature, developmentally delayed and appeared to have befriended the girl because she was "essentially his peer, emotionally," said the judge.
She said Embley was driven to seek out the girl by "social awkwardness" rather than the "deviant interests" seen in most cases. The judge added Embley also didn't appear to have real plans to follow through on his talk of rescuing the girl from her unhappy home life. Those were more of a "flight of fancy," she said.
Both Crown prosecutor Nicole Gregoire and defence lawyer
Joel Whysall had recommended a conditional sentence for Embley, noting he is not a pedophile and had a very low risk to reoffend.
Embley first met the teenager online in May of 2009 through an touch pets application, and chatted through various websites geared to teens, including Nimbuzz and Bebo. At first, Embley told the girl he was a 14-year-old boy from Canada, while she told him she was 13 and revealed she was having problems at home.
After about a month of online chatting, he confessed he was really 44 years old. "He wanted to marry her, but she said she didn't want to get married so he said he would adopt her," said Gregoire in an earlier sentencing hearing. "He said if he adopted her, she would have a better life."
Police in Colorado were alerted to the virtual relationship when the girl told a friend about a supposed plan for the two to run away together in August 2009. Police officers then secretly took over the girl's online identity to talk to Embley, while tracking him through various server addresses.
The day before the two were to meet, however, Embley sent a message to the girl, saying he couldn't come to get her.
Defence lawyer Joel Whysall told the judge in the sentencing hearing Embley never had explicit sexual conversations with the girl and gave his real name and address on the chat sites he used to communicate with her. "The real predators who are online do not use their real address, real name or real email," he said.
Embley has also been diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder.
In handing down her sentence, Baird Ellan noted Embley was "in no position to either marry or adopt the girl" as he had described, especially considering he was already married. He also had an "extreme lack of sexual sophistication," telling one psychologist he had never had sex, the judge noted. "It is apparent that Mr. Embley had an emotional attachment which is quite different from the textbook profile of an Internet sexual predator," she said.
As part of his conditional sentence, the judge banned Embley from all Internet chat sites and from communicating electronically with anyone under 19. He will also be placed on probation for two years and on the sex offender registry for 10 years.
