Internet perv used 'premeditated torture'
Author: TONY BLAIS
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A "sinister" Montreal man who lured two Alberta teen girls on the Internet and extorted them to send him sexually explicit webcams committed "premeditated torture."

That is how Alberta's highest court described the crimes of Joshua Innes in a decision released yesterday rejecting his appeal of the seven-year prison term he was given.

The three-judge panel ruled the sentence was within the range and appropriate for the "cruel" method used by Innes, the amount of time the crimes went on and the amount of "mental suffering" the two girls endured.

"They followed a carefully scripted premeditated pattern of deception and cajolement through to springing a prepared trap and they involved repeated very strong threats imposed to extort sexual activity," says the decision.

"This offender was devious and ingenious enough to create sexual activity and harm in the complainant's own bedroom, without a face-to-face meeting."

Innes, 26, pleaded guilty last May to two counts of luring a child under 18 on the Internet, two counts of extortion and counselling someone to make child pornography.

Court heard Innes tricked a 13-year-old Edmonton girl into undressing and touching herself on a webcam transmission by posing as a 16-year-old girl named Nicky.

Innes encouraged the 13-year-old to send the transmission by sending her a video supposedly showing Nicky undressing and masturbating in a webcam transmission.

A week later, Innes contacted the girl on an Internet chatroom and admitted he had been pretending to be a girl.

He also said he had recorded the transmission and told her to perform more sex acts on webcam or he would send the video to her friends on the Internet social networking site Nexopia.

The girl became distraught and told some friends what had happened and one of them told her parents, who then told the victim's parents, who then contacted police.

Innes was busted at his St. Laurent home after city police posed as the victim in an online sting operation.

Police also discovered Innes was having similar chatroom conversations with a 14-year-old girl from Airdrie.

The teen had willingly taken off her clothes and touched herself on a webcam transmitted on an Internet site and Innes tried to blackmail her into doing it some more.

Innes told the girl he had moved to the next town and threatened to print pictures of her webcam transmission and post them at her school and mother's work.

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