A British Columbia man accused of sexually assaulting his patients has been granted a new trial after the B.C. Court of Appeal overturned his previous conviction.
Allen James Brook was convicted in 2020 on two counts of sexual assault that allegedly occurred while he was an X-ray technician at a Maple Ridge hospital in 1990 and 1997.
He was acquitted of a third count of sexual assault that was alleged to have occurred in 2001.
Brookes was charged in November 2017.
The ruling, written by Justice Elizabeth Bennett on behalf of the three-judge appeal court panel, said that the original case's judge admitted evidence of a fourth patient who alleged she had been sexually assaulted in 1990.
In his appeal, Brooks argued, among other things, that the trial judge erred in admitting the evidence of the fourth patient and in his assessment of credibility as he had not been charged.
“Admission solely to support the evidence of the complainants was not a proper basis to admit the evidence, as the only relevance would be that Mr. Brooks was the ‘kind of person’ who committed the acts in question,” wrote Bennett.
Brooks testified that there was no sexual intent in the alleged touching of the three female patients, noting he had excused himself from performing a chest X-ray for one of the women, and that his actions had been part of his BCIT instruction.
“He said BCIT acknowledged that they had trained him incorrectly and changed the method of teaching men to conduct chest X-rays,” Bennett said.
