After snatching a second trial, ex-judge Jacques Delisle, accused of killing his wife in 2009, is now trying to avoid it: he is in court this week to ask him to issue a judgment criminal proceedings brought against him.
This legal saga has been going on for more than 10 years.
The 86-year-old has always claimed his innocence, and his two children believe him, according to one of his procedures.
According to the version of the ex-magistrate, his wife, depressed and paralyzed on the right side, took her own life using a revolver. The Crown prosecutor pleads for his part that Jacques Delisle got rid of his wife to live with his mistress and avoid a costly divorce.
The former judge of the Court of Appeal was convicted in 2012 of the first degree murder of his wife and sentenced to life in prison. He had appealed against this conviction and exhausted all his remedies, without success, until the intervention of Federal Minister of Justice David Lametti.
In April, he had succeeded in getting the latter to hold the second trial. This is a very rarely used procedure, but allows the Minister to intervene when he has reason to believe that a “miscarriage of justice” has “probably occurred”.
Minister Lametti was of this opinion, because there was, according to him, discovery of “new information” which was not before the courts at the time of the trial of Jacques Delisle and of his appeal.
But since then, his lawyer, Me Jacques Larochelle, filed a motion for a stay of proceedings “for unreasonable delays and abuse”.
The “new information” that the Minister of Justice benefited from during his investigation is expert evidence that calls into question the Crown’s theory on the trajectory of the pistol bullet that killed Ms. Nicole Rainville, alleges the accused.
There are two opposing theories: The Crown maintains that the woman was killed at close range by a weapon at a 30 degree angle while the defense maintains that it was a self-inflicted fire, perpendicularly, with an outfit of the weapon certainly unconventional but possible. These findings are based on the physical evidence of gunshot wounds on the woman’s head and the soot marks on her hand.
Since Monday morning, Me Larochelle strives to demonstrate the errors made by the experts of the Crown: according to him, the autopsy report, carried out by the pathologist, a representative of the State, is “faulty and defective. “
This prevented or delayed the discovery of the perpendicular trajectory which is put forward by the defense.
This is why a new trial would violate the constitutional rights of an accused to make full answer and defense as well as to have a trial within a reasonable time – the man has been detained for nine years and has only recently been detained. released pending trial.
Lawyers are scheduled to argue these issues for three days this week.