A man who spent 27 years in prison before he was found to have been wrongfully convicted has been ordered by a British Columbia Supreme Court judge to pay $375,000 each to five women who sued him for sexual assault.

Ivan Henry was convicted of 10 counts of sexual assault in 1983, but he was released when the B.C. Court of Appeal acquitted him in 2010 after determining he had been wrongfully convicted.

Henry represented himself at his trial in 1983, and he was given an indefinite sentence as a dangerous offender, but he was released and later awarded $8 million in his own civil lawsuit against the City of Vancouver and the provincial and federal governments.

Five women later filed a civil lawsuit against Henry, maintaining that despite the convictions being overturned, he was the man who sexually assaulted them in their Vancouver homes in the early 1980s.

The plaintiffs are identified in the ruling by their initials, with descriptions of their sexual assaults in their ground-floor or basement suites between May 1981 and June 1982.

Justice Miriam Gropper's ruling released Wednesday says the court in Henry's wrongful conviction lawsuit found Crown prosecutors had "seriously infringed" on his right to a fair trial, demonstrating a "shocking disregard" for his Charter rights.

Gropper's ruling says evidence that wasn't disclosed to Henry "would have likely resulted in his acquittal at his 1983 criminal trial and the avoidance of sentencing as a dangerous offender."

Some of that evidence "included the large volume of material statements made by the various complainants, including the five plaintiffs," according to the ruling.

Gropper, however, found Henry liable in the civil lawsuit, saying in her ruling, "It is more likely than not that he was their attacker and performed the sexual assaults … on a balance of probabilities."

"Henry is not a credible witness. I do not accept his denials over the plaintiffs' evidence," the judge wrote.

Civil cases and criminal cases have "different standards of proof," the ruling says, and acquittals in crimes that weren't proven beyond a reasonable doubt do not prevent alleged victims from filing lawsuits.

"An acquittal is not a bar to a civil suit," the ruling says. "This action for damages addresses Mr. Henry's liability for the assaults on the plaintiffs, assessed on the civil standard of proof: whether, on a balance of probabilities, the plaintiffs have proved that he was the person who raped each of them."

The women had argued that Henry's sentence was "cut short" and that the $8 million won in his lawsuit was "wrongfully gained," but the judge disagreed.

"He should not have been convicted and should not have spent any time in jail," Gropper ruled. "He was entitled to the damages that he received."

Gropper's ruling says each of the women were "proud of their independence," living alone in their suites, and "their hopes and dreams were shattered when a stranger entered their apartments in the middle of the night."

In her decision, Gropper also says she doesn't disagree with the findings of the court that acquitted Henry in 2010 and didn't find "them to be in error."

"Although I have found Mr. Henry to be liable for his sexual assaults of the plaintiffs, he was acquitted of the criminal charges after he served 27 years in federal custody," the ruling says. "He has not gone unpunished."

Vancouver lawyers Irina Kordic and Kevin Gourlay represented the five women in the lawsuit and say in a statement that the plaintiffs felt they'd been left "voiceless" in the years since he was released, as a public narrative emerged that he was an "innocent man."

The women are now in their 60s and 70s, and their lawyers say their clients are grateful their voices have been heard by the justice system.

The court's decision confirms "what these five remarkably brave women have said for over four decades: Ivan Henry was the man who sexually assaulted each of them," the statement says.

"The legal process has been a long and arduous journey," it says, adding the plaintiffs have lived "remarkable lives."

It said the women now hope the legal system will not just focus on offenders' rights in cases of wrongful convictions while denying victims support during some of the "worst moments of one's life."

"Victims should not be left to fight for themselves," the statement said.

Emma Cunliffe, a law professor at the University of British Columbia, has been following the Henry case for many years.

She said the victims were "shut out" as Henry pursued damages for his wrongful conviction, and their civil legal victory reflects that a wrongful conviction doesn't necessarily equal innocence.

"We can exonerate or acquit somebody in the circumstances where we have a reasonable doubt about their guilt, including on the basis that there's been state misconduct," she said. "Factual innocence is not necessarily the standard by which we identify wrongful convictions, and we do need to be careful in how we talk about these cases."

Cunliffe said the legal system lacks a "holistic" approach that, in Henry's case, saw the victims unable to meaningfully participate as he pursued damages for his wrongful conviction.

"The plaintiffs tried in a number of ways to ensure that their experiences and their voices were included in the process of understanding the harms of this wrongful conviction, and they were excluded by the legal system at every turn," she said.

Cunliffe said the Supreme Court of Canada denied the victims' bid to intervene in Henry's case, a topic she tackled in a 2017 article exploring the problematic "loss of the victims' voices from the wrongful conviction process."

She said criminal law is an "adversarial system" that isn't capable of tackling cases where it could be true that victims were harmed at the same time a perpetrator was mistreated.

"We lose an understanding of the harms of the system if we focus on one of those problems to the exclusion of the other," she said.