TORONTO — An Ontario medical student alleged to have forced two American teenage sisters to engage in sexual acts while he watched via Skype has been ordered extradited to the United States.
A lawyer for Marco (Mark) Viscomi says a Superior Court judge in Toronto issued the extradition order on Tuesday.
But Viscomi can appeal the latest order — he staved off another attempt in 2015 to remove him from the country — and his lawyer, Julianna Greenspan, says he intends to do so.
The case involving Viscomi arose in January 2012, when someone had a webcam chat with a 17-year old girl in Virginia Beach, Va.
According to court documents, the person allegedly used threats to force the girl to expose her breasts, and then to engage in explicit sexual and sexually violent activities with her 13-year-old sister.
American police tracked the communications through the Internet protocol (IP) address and information from an Internet service provider to a home in Stouffville, Ont., about 50 kilometres north of Toronto. Viscomi was living there with his parents.
Ontario police arrested and charged Viscomi in March 2012, and released him on bail.
Five months later, they rearrested him at the request of American authorities. They then withdrew the Canadian charges in favour of extradition proceedings to the U.S., where he faced allegations of Internet child luring and child exploitation.
In May 2013, Ontario Superior Court Justice Ken Campbell ordered Viscomi sent to the United States for trial on the American equivalent of the Canadian crime of child luring.
But Ontario's Court of Appeal found several problems with the evidence on which Campbell relied and quashed his extradition order.
For one thing, the court said, there was no definitive proof that it was in fact Viscomi using the computer identified by the IP address.
Nor was there evidence proving that an IP address combined with other subscriber information allows police to compile an unassailable history of a person's activity on the Internet, the court ruled.
"Everyone acknowledges that Internet child luring and exploitation occurred," the appeal court said in its ruling last year. "However, the lynch-pin issue concerning the Viscomi proceedings is whether he is the 'someone' who was on the other end of the video call."
There are three key stages to Canada's extradition process — the justice minister must decide whether to authorize the start of extradition proceedings in Canadian courts, then the courts must decide if there's sufficient evidence to justify the person's committal for extradition, and if a person is committed for extradition, the justice minister must personally decide whether to order the person's surrender to a foreign state.
A person can appeal their committal and can also seek judicial review of the minister's surrender order.
