Former Quebec judge pleads guilty to manslaughter in wife’s death

A retired 88-year-old Quebec judge, who was facing a second murder trial in his wife’s 2009 shooting death, pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Thursday.

Jacques Delisle’s lawyer, Jacques Larochelle told a Quebec City courtroom that his client did not shoot Marie Nicole Rainville, 71, but he caused her death by leaving a loaded gun next to her at her request. She was found dead in the couple’s Quebec City apartment in November 2009.

Larochelle painted his client as a loving husband, but acknowledged he had taken a more active role in what he called her suicide – than he previously admitted to police. Rainville had suffered a stroke in 2007 that left her paralyzed on one side.

“Delisle initially told me the same story he had told the police, that the gun was on a console and loaded, because he had put it there while waiting to hand it over to the police officer,” said Larochelle at a press conference in French. “Well, I obviously questioned him at length about this, but he wouldn’t budge. So, I have no choice but to accept his story. And maybe one or two days before the trial, he told me that in the end, he wanted to tell me the truth and that it was he who had loaded the gun. It was him, who grabbed the gun from the shelf.”

The Crown maintained that Delisle took an active part in the death.

But Delisle’s lawyer argued that although he was “negligent” in leaving the loaded weapon – that the time served was “more than sufficient.”

“In order to bring this case to a judicial conclusion in the interests of justice, we agreed, following a process facilitated by the Superior Court, not to hold a new trial for premeditated murder, considering in particular that Jacques Delisle acknowledged having caused the death of his wife by knowingly committing voluntary manslaughter,” said Patrick Michel, the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP) in Quebec. “He has already served almost nine years in prison and the time that has elapsed since the events has been more than 14 years.”

More than 15 years of proclaiming his innocence

Delisle, a former judge at the Quebec Court of Appeal, was found guilty of premeditated murder of his wife by a jury on June 14, 2012, but he has always said that she committed suicide.

The verdict was largely based on the testimony of a pathologist who claimed the trajectory of the bullet in the victim’s brain made it difficult to support the suicide theory.

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

The former judge went to the Supreme Court to try to appeal this verdict but was rejected in December 2013.

Delisle did not give up, requesting a review in 2015 from the federal minister of justice, who then entrusted the file to the Criminal Conviction Review Group (CCRG).

The report was based on the analysis of five pathologists and four ballistics experts.

They concluded the autopsy report was deficient and criticized the loss of evidence because the victim’s brain, cuts and the photographic documentation had not been preserved.

In April 2021, the former federal Minister of Justice David Lametti reviewed the evidence that had not been submitted in court at the time of the trial or appeal and ordered a new trial.

Lametti concluded that a miscarriage of justice had probably occurred in this case.

A new trial never took place

In Superior Court, Delisle’s lawyers successfully argued that a new trial would be impossible because a Crown expert had made serious errors in the pathology report.

They also argued there had been unreasonable delays throughout the trial.

In September 2023, the Court of Appeal overturned the stay of proceedings pronounced in April and returned the case to the Superior Court.

On Thursday, Delisle was sentenced to one more day in jail – but was expected to be released within a few hours.

-With files from La Presse Canadienne