Pride and guilt

Fifteen years later, the case of judge Jacques Delisle finally ended with an admission of guilt.

Jacques Delisle had the pretension, or the pride, to remain silent during his trial.

Judicial history, and common sense, however, teaches that when you are accused of a serious crime, in particular of having murdered your wife, you will explain yourself to the jury. That goes for everyone. But even more so for a lawyer who sat on the Quebec Court of Appeal.

It took a lot of pretension, and pride too, to assert one’s right to silence in such circumstances.

Perhaps because he had been told too many times that his notorious pretension and pride would make him unsympathetic to the 12 citizens in whose hands the law had placed his life. But a jury does not sentence a man to life imprisonment because his head does not return to him. He listens to the evidence, weighs the elements, puts it on his mental scale and sees if there remains a reasonable doubt.

The claim was to believe that the defense’s scientific expertise had destroyed the prosecution’s evidence. It was never true. And even if it had been true, you still had to have the humility to tell a story that stood up to this jury. His story, the last to see Nicole Rainville alive.

A story that he partly told journalists later: his wife, severely disabled following a stroke, often talked about committing suicide. All his friends are witnesses to the care he had for her. And one day when they were arguing, he left her his loaded gun and told her to do what she wanted. He went for a walk and, he said, found her dead when he returned, with a gunshot to the head.

He would have had to admit publicly that he had a relationship with another woman. That they had talked about starting a new life together. That he also had an unregistered weapon, therefore illegal. A human story,
that is to say, not perfect or particularly edifying, but which could have raised doubt.

Humility and humanity have a common Latin root, it seems: humus, Earth. We’re talking about very earthly things here.

I write “could have raised a doubt”, because there is a stain which darkens this story even more. An indelible stain of powder in Nicole Rainville’s hand. The hand with which she supposedly took the gun to kill herself. You can’t have a big speck of powder in the palm of your hand if you’re holding a handgun. The whole investigation starts from there: for the police, it was a defensive wound. The victim put his weak hand up to protect himself from the point-blank shot… his palm was encrusted with powder.

Maybe a testimony wouldn’t have changed anything. But the absence of testimony from the accused condemned him.

He was therefore condemned. Conviction confirmed on appeal – by judges who never sat with him, but all the same: by “his” Court of Appeal! Confirmed by the Supreme Court. Unanimous.

Then, having presented seven new expert reports, he convinced the Criminal Conviction Review Group that he may have been the victim of a “judicial error”. This almost never happens: once a year in Canada (not miscarriages of justice, official acknowledgments of error). Justice Minister David Lametti ordered a new trial. You could say he was lucky, given the number of convicts lining up…

Good for him.

The judge presiding over this second trial ordered a complete halt to the legal process: the victim’s brain samples had been misplaced or destroyed inadvertently. The defense claimed that this prevented the judge from having a full defense. Because the defense, with its seven experts, made much of the trajectory of the projectile in the victim’s brain: the angle could suggest a shooting position compatible with murder or suicide.

The Court of Appeal, last year, said no: we can very well have a trial with the rest of the evidence, despite this error in the preservation of the evidence.

Because this story of the projectile trajectory is a sort of smokescreen: the most damning proof remains this stain in the palm, which could only be compatible with suicide if M^me Rainville had held the weapon in an acrobatic finger position.

This Thursday, the Supreme Court was to say whether it agreed to consider in turn the question of whether or not a second trial should take place. I would have been very surprised if she did. There would therefore certainly have been a trial with this 88-year-old accused, who has already served nine years in penitentiary…

Mediation resulted in this compromise: the ex-judge will admit guilty of a lesser crime (probably criminal negligence causing death or incitement to suicide). He will be sentenced to “time served”: he has already served his sentence.

Some will criticize the public prosecutor for being “tough”, given the age of the accused. This is not my opinion. The evidence fully justifies a trial for what is the most serious crime in the Code. There was no need to be complacent under the pretext of old age. They owed it to the victim, and to justice in short.

Others (the same ones, in fact) will say that the accused no longer had a choice, at his age, and pleaded guilty due to exhaustion and lack of resources. To this, I respond that for a rigorous lawman like him, “guilty” means “I did it”, means “I am responsible for the death of Nicole Rainville”, no matter how you arrange the story. Otherwise, pleading guilty is worthless, right?

In the circumstances, it’s a reasonable compromise, I would say almost fair.