Police officer Roger Fréchette was acquitted of the charges of sexual assault against him. And this, although Judge Lori René Weitzman did not believe the accused’s version.
Mr. Fréchette’s testimony is “so crazy that the court completely rules out”, said the judge who rendered her decision Wednesday at the Montreal courthouse. According to her, it is obvious that the police officer went to the complainant’s hotel room with sexual intentions.
However, according to the judge, the testimony of the complainant, which the court forbade to identify, also contains “inconsistencies and contradictions”, linked in particular to a post-traumatic shock syndrome and to her state of intoxication during this. evening.
“Although one of the objectives of a criminal trial is the search for the truth, the evidence presented does not always make it possible to truly and precisely know the course of a targeted incident,” explains the judge.
However, after having analyzed all the evidence, the judge said she was “unable to say what happened in the hotel room. “
“Even if Mr. Fréchette’s testimony is dismissed as not being credible, that does not automatically mean that the testimony of [la plaignante], specifies the judge. No doubt that [la plaignante] had a bad experience on February 18, 2019 and the court understands his frustration at not being able to trust his memory of the events. However, her version of the facts is not sufficiently reliable to conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that she was sexually assaulted by Mr. Fréchette. “
Recall that the complainant came to spend the weekend in Montreal with her lover at the time in February 2019. She was arrested in the evening for intoxication on the public highway and detained overnight. Police officer Roger Fréchette, who was responsible for monitoring detainees that night, had had several interactions with her. During her testimony last July, the complainant maintained that he had made comments of a sexual nature, stating in particular that he liked her to be “like an animal in a cage”.
The police officer admitted to waiting for her in his car and driving her back to his hotel. According to him, he was then acting in good faith, to do her a favor because she was not dressed properly for the season and did not know anyone to help her. Both parties acknowledged that there were acts of a sexual nature in the bedroom, namely that the complainant’s hand was on the police officer’s pants. The complainant maintains that it was the police officer who put his hand on his penis, while the latter claims that it was rather the complainant who undertook this gesture to which he did not consent.
Further details will follow.