Sentenced for the murder of Clémence Beaulieu-Patry, a young employee of a Maxi grocery store in Montreal, Randy Tshilumba will have a 2e court case. The Court of Appeal decreed it in a judgment rendered on Monday.
Randy Tshilumba was convicted in 2017 of the first degree murder of the 20-year-old. He had stabbed her to death the previous year right in the middle of the grocery store where she worked, in plain sight.
“A tragic event, of very great violence”, notes the Court of Appeal.
He was sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole for 25 years, the most severe sentence in the Criminal Code.
Mental disorders and intention
The young man had pleaded to have committed these gestures because of the mental disorders from which he was suffering, in particular a delirium of persecution, in which his life was threatened by Clémence and her friends.
The Crown maintained that it was a premeditated murder.
The challenge for the jury was therefore to determine whether the mental disorder with which he was afflicted — a fact not disputed at the trial — prevented him from knowing whether the actions he was doing were good or bad and whether these disorders should raise a reasonable doubt about his ability to have the requisite intent to commit murder.
Judge’s Directions
But before rendering its verdict on these delicate questions, the jury received “inadequate” instructions from Superior Court judge Hélène Di Salvo, the Court of Appeal ruled.
“The directives communicated were unnecessarily long, unnecessarily complex, but above all clearly contradictory and prejudicial to the position of the appellant (Randy Tshilumba). »
The instructions are intended to clarify and simplify the task of the jury, the Court recalls. However, this was not the case: they created confusion.
To rectify the situation, the holding of a new trial is necessary, considers the Court of Appeal.
More details will follow.