A jury convicted him of first-degree murder, but he insisted that she died by suicide, and eventually the justice minister reviewed the case and ordered a retrial that never happened
Former Quebec judge Jacques Delisle, left, walks into court with his granddaughter Anne Sophie Morency, on June 14, 2012, in Quebec City.Former judge Jacques Delisle was a stickler for form and language – a man who lived by the law and for the law and did not hesitate to berate those who made a legal or grammatical error while appearing before him.
Mr. Delisle’s legal ordeal began with a lie. On Nov. 12, 2009, he returned home from a grocery shopping expedition to find his wife, Nicole Rainville, dead on the living room sofa, a .22-calibre pistol he owned by her side. To argue the case, Mr. Delisle turned to Jacques Larochelle, a criminal lawyer whose previous clients included Hells Angels leader Maurice Boucher, convicted of killing two prison guards, Théoneste Bagosora, an architect of the Rwandan genocide, and former Quebec Superior Court judge Robert Flahiff, who laundered money for a client before he ascended to the bench.
But Mr. Larochelle stuck by his client. In 2015, in a last-ditch effort, he asked then-federal justice minister Peter MacKay to conduct a review to determine if Mr. Delisle had been wrongfully convicted. To bolster the request, he approached James Lockyer of Innocence Canada, who had played a key role in exposing the wrongful convictions of Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard and Stephen Truscott, among others.
“It’s hard to blame the police for this,” Mr. Lockyer said. “They are expected to adopt what the experts tell them and then act on it. But the experts’ work was, in my opinion, a disgrace that led everyone down the wrong path. The incompetence of the autopsy led to the house of cards that made up the case.”
In the meantime, the ministerial review ground on, passing from Mr. MacKay to Jody Wilson-Raybould and finally to her successor, David Lametti, who had previously worked for legal and human rights luminaries such as Irwin Cotler and former Supreme Court justice Peter Cory.
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