Overview

• Justice Sarah Inness granted summary judgment in Winnipeg, dismissing the 2023 lawsuit without proceeding to a civil trial.
• The complaint alleged that James abused a student over two weeks in 1983 while substitute teaching in the St. James Assiniboia School Division.
• Inness ruled that the complainant’s recollection was too unreliable to identify James as the assailant in those decades-old events.
• Defence lawyers presented income tax data, school attendance records and police reports to challenge James’s presence at the school in 1983.
• The judge stressed that James’s status as a notorious child sex offender and his lifetime coaching ban could not substitute for evidence of the 1983 allegations.