The Quebec Court of Appeal on Monday ordered a third trial for Lavallois Adèle Sorella, accused of the murder of her two young daughters.
She thus overturned the guilty verdicts for second degree murder which had been rendered in 2019. The 56-year-old woman was then sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole for 10 years.
This time, the Court of Appeal ruled that the trial judge erred in denying Ms.me Sorella the right to plead organized crime involvement in the murders of nine-year-old Amanda and eight-year-old Sabrina.
“We cannot claim that this error is trivial,” writes the Court of Appeal.
However, she refused to acquit the woman of the charges against her.
At the end of the first trial, in 2013, the jury found her guilty of premeditated murder, a more serious crime. But there too, due to erroneous instructions given to the jury, the verdict had been set aside and a second trial ordered.
Found dead 13 years ago
On March 31, 2009, the two little girls were found lifeless, lying side by side in their playroom in the basement of the family home in Laval.
A particular element in this case is that the cause of death of the girls was never determined: their bodies bore no marks, nor any indication of what could have happened to them.
The Crown has argued that the most probable cause of their death is that the two children were placed in the hyperbaric chamber installed in the house – to treat one of the little girls – and that they were deprived of oxygen.
This “hyperbaric chamber theory” was presented to the jury, but not the “mafia theory” offered by the defense, had pleaded before the Court of Appeal last November Mand Ronald Prégent, one of Mr.me Sorella.
At trial, the defense argued that Ms.me Sorella — and father of their children — was involved in organized crime. It was then possible that someone entered the house to attack the girls, with the aim of reaching their father. The latter, Giuseppe De Vito, was on the run at the time and wanted by the police. Finally arrested in 2010, he was found dead in his cell three years later, poisoned with cyanide in a maximum security prison.
This theory would have opened the door to the possibility that someone else committed the homicide, continued Mr.and Prégent, while the Crown argued that Ms.me Sorella was the only one who could have committed this crime.
This was one of the grounds advanced by the defense to quash the guilty verdict. The Court of Appeal granted it in its judgment delivered on Monday.