The Court of Appeal should look into the case of former judge Jacques Delisle this fall, released last month from the premeditated murder charge against him.
• Read also: The Crown on appeal in the Delisle case
• To read also: “Unacceptable negligence” in the laboratory: ex-judge Delisle, not a unique case
The parties should indeed present their arguments before the Court of Appeal during the week of November 21, according to our information.
Recall that a stay of proceedings was pronounced on April 8 against the 87-year-old man, who was previously accused of having murdered his wife, Nicole Rainville.
In his decision, Superior Court Judge Jean-François Emond found that a Crown expert had shown “unacceptable negligence” at the time of the autopsy of the deceased, by not preserving photographs of the brain sections.
This evidence would have been essential to follow the trajectory of the projectile in the head of Nicole Rainville and to clarify the question of the angle of fire, ruled the magistrate.
Three weeks later, the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP) appealed, arguing that the court-ordered stay of proceedings interfered with “the fundamental process of seeking the truth” and thus undermined public confidence in the administration of justice.
“The honorable trial judge confuses different legal regimes that govern the gathering, preservation and disclosure of evidence, thus contributing to imposing on the state obligations that are unprecedented in Canadian law,” wrote the prosecutors in the record. , Me François Godin and Me Julien Beauchamp-Laliberté.
The defense responds
On May 18, Jacques Delisle’s lawyers filed a motion to dismiss the Crown’s appeal, deemed “vexatious, totally unfair […] lodged in bad faith, contrary to the rules of decency and fair play and “abusive”.
In a ten-page document, lawyers Jacques Larochelle and Maxime Roy recall that seven pathologists concluded that the Crown expert should have kept the evidence resulting from the cutting of the brain at the time of the autopsy.
What is more, a recent report by European experts, mobilized by the public prosecutor, concludes that “the absence of photographs of the brain as well as the absence of a detailed description of the lesions suffered by the latter and their location severely limit our ability to determine a trajectory,” the lawyers write.
This demonstrates the “bad faith” of the Crown, according to the respondent, who also points out that this opinion, produced in December 2021, was not filed in evidence by the public prosecutor before the Superior Court.
