Quebec City sword attack 2020: Court overturns Carl Girouard’s guilty verdict

The Court of Appeal overturned the guilty verdict of Carl Girouard, the perpetrator of the fatal sword attacks in Quebec City on Halloween night in 2020.

Girouard had been found guilty of first-degree murder and attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years.

In a decision made public on Tuesday, the Court of Appeal ordered a new trial.

“The trial judge failed to properly instruct the jury on the impossibility of using the appellant’s silence to decide the question of his guilt,” reads the decision of judges Martin Vauclair, Suzanne Gagné and Christine Baudoin.

At the trial, Girouard admitted to being the perpetrator of the sword blows that caused death and injuries, but, as highlighted in the decision rendered Tuesday by the Court of Appeal, “the debate centered on his mental state at the time he committed these acts.”

The murderer pleaded not criminally responsible due to mental illness.

However, the jury rejected mental disorder as a defense and determined that he intended to kill.

The victims were chosen at random. 

61-year-old Suzanne Clermont and 56-year-old François Duchesne were killed and five others were injured.

Girouard, a then 24-year-old man from Sainte-Thérèse – north of Montreal – was arrested immediately following the attacks.

On May 20, 2022, after five days of deliberation, Girouard was convicted of first-degree murders of Clermont and Duchesne and five counts of attempted murder unanimously by jurors at the Quebec Superior Court.

He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years in June 2022.

A five-hour silence

The police interrogation that Girouard underwent after his arrest was one of the elements that led defense lawyer Pierre Gagnon to challenge the judge’s decision. 

During the trial, Judge François Grenier, in the absence of the jury, denounced the length of the interrogation which lasted more than five hours, during which Girouard remained silent, which was within his rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. 

Gagnon explained at the time that he considered the Crown’s interpretation of this silence during the trial to be “problematic,” “in an attempt to establish that my client was aware of what was happening and that he was ultimately in control of himself.” 

The defense lawyer believed that this interpretation would have resulted in a directive from the judge to the jury. He therefore appealed the decision.

The judges of the Court of Appeal agreed with him on Tuesday and maintain that Judge François Grenier should have indicated to the jury, in his final instructions, “a specific directive according to which no inference of guilt could be drawn from the exercise of the appellant’s right to remain silent.”

Court of Appeal Judge Martin Vauclair concluded that “the absence of a directive requires that a new trial be ordered.”

In May 2022, the 11 members of the jury unanimously decided that Girouard was guilty of the first-degree murders of Suzanne Clermont and François Duchesne. 

He had also been convicted of five attempted murders. 

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews