A retired violin teacher from Chatham who was sentenced to eight months in jail for sexual assault in March is already out on parole.
Claude Trachy applied for parole and was recently released by the Parole Board of Canada after serving just one-third of his sentence. The conditions of his parole have not yet been made available.
Trachy was also handed two years of probation in Chatham court March 2 and is registered as a sex offender for sexually assaulting 21 girls he taught. The assaults involved Trachy touching the breasts of his students while pretending he was fitting them for chin and shoulder rests for their violins.
He was charged in 2015 with indecent assault, sexual assault, sexual interference and sexual exploitation for incidents that took place between 1971 and 1993.
Trachy was acquitted of all sexual assault charges in 2018, but the Crown appealed that ruling and he was convicted last year. The trial judge who ruled Trachy was not guilty said at the time that he didn’t have enough evidence to convict Trachy, and agreed with the defence that the former violin teacher had no sexual intent and received no sexual gratification from the encounters. The Ontario Court of Appeal overturned that decision nearly a year ago.
The disgraced 73-year-old former teacher was to serve five months and 10 days in jail because all provincial sentences get one third off but he was eligible for earlier parole with good behaviour, according to his former defence lawyer Ken Marley, who works out of Windsor.
Blackburn News has requested a copy of the decision from the Parole Board of Canada.