Saskatoon judge erases Cree medicine man's guilty pleas in sexual assault case

Warning: this story contains details of alleged sexual assaults.

A Saskatoon provincial court judge is letting a self-styled Cree medicine man rescind his 12 guilty pleas in a sexual assault case.

Judge Sanjeev Anand ruled Tuesday that Cecil Wolfe's lawyer did not properly explain the consequences of pleading guilty to the charges, which span a period from 2013 to 2021.

Anand reached the conclusion after an expungement hearing earlier this year.

Wolfe had "ineffective assistance of counsel" at his sentencing hearing last October, Anand said. Specifically, Anand said that lawyer Loretta Pete-Lambert "grossly overestimated" Wolfe's potential time in prison, and that she advised him that he would not likely succeed at trial.

Wolfe said he would not have pleaded guilty if he knew the jointly proposed sentence would be nine and a half years.

• Cree medicine man who allegedly sexually assaulted patients fires lawyer in middle of sentencing

Anand said Pete-Lambert also didn't go through the the Crown's disclosure package with Wolfe, or go over statements from witnesses in any detail. She also failed to explain that he didn't have to plead guilty to all the charges.

At the initial sentencing hearing, Anand heard how Wolfe presented himself as an elder with knowledge of traditional healing practices.

He would instruct the women to come wearing a skirt and, in some cases, to remove their bras in advance. He would stroke their arms, legs and torsos, quizzing them on drug use and their sexual histories. He would also digitally penetrate them for between one and four minutes, court heard.

"There's something down there and I need to take it out," one victim quoted him as saying before penetrating her.

After the assaults, Wolfe would produce trinkets, snakeskins, cat claws and ribbons, all "bad medicine" that he claimed to have extracted from their genitals.

Prosecutor Lana Morelli said the women initially tolerated the touching "because he was a medicine man and had great power."

Wolfe returns to court Sept. 25.