Three complaints against Judge Matthieu Poliquin, behind the conditional discharge of Simon Houle, a man from Trois-Rivières convicted of sexual assault and voyeurism, were dismissed by the Judicial Council.
In a decision rendered on November 17 and published Wednesday on the website of the body responsible for ensuring that judges respect their code of ethics, the Council ruled that these complaints were not admissible.
As explained in the decision, which does not name Judge Poliquin, the code of ethics for judges governs their “conduct”, but not their freedom of expression or the decisions they render.
“The complaints examined do not allege any ethical breach by the judge in terms of his behavior, but rather allege that he made errors in his assessment of the facts of a file as well as in his analysis of the law and the factors or criteria for determining the appropriate sentence,” it explains.
The Conseil de la magistrature recalls that it is not “an appeal or review body” for decisions rendered by judges, a role that falls rather to the superior courts.
Recall that Judge Matthieu Poliquin, in a decision rendered in June whose tone had raised controversy, had granted conditional discharge to Mr. Houle, an engineer from Trois-Rivières found guilty of sexual assault and voyeurism.
The 27-year-old man at the time had undressed the victim while she was impaired and asleep before inserting his fingers into her vagina and took photos of her body.
The event had taken place “all in all quickly”, can we read in the decision of Judge Poliquin.
The Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions, who demanded a prison sentence of 15 to 18 months, had notably criticized Judge Poliquin for having “pronounced a manifestly unreasonable sentence”.