Former Quebec judge Jacques Delisle, left, walks into court with his granddaughter Anne Sophie Morency, on June 14, 2012, in Quebec City.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press
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.
Severe, with deep-set dark eyes, a shock of thick grey hair and a patrician bearing, he led what seemed a charmed life from the get-go, with nary a hint of what was to come. Born on May 4, 1935, the son of a Quebec City forestry engineer, he graduated with a law degree from Laval University in 1957 with a slew of honours, including the Governor-General’s gold medal and a scholarship from the government of France that saw him attend the University of Paris, studying private civil law and political science for one academic year.
In 1985, he was appointed to the Quebec Superior Court, then in 1992, he was elevated to the Quebec Court of Appeal, where he sat until 2009, the same year his wife of nearly 50 years died from a gunshot wound to the head in the couple’s condo. Seven months later, he would become the first judge in Canadian history to be charged with murder.
Mr. Delisle died on Aug. 10 at the age of 89, nearly five months after he, a gaunt, destroyed man, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the case, admitting that he had given his wife a loaded, cocked gun at her request.
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.
He told investigators he had left the pistol on a table in the entryway and that his wife must have found it. She had been battling depression since a stroke had upended her life two years earlier, he explained, and that things had become worse since she had broken a hip the previous summer.
At first, investigators accepted Mr. Delisle’s version of what had happened. But then they began to question how Ms. Rainville could have held the gun and pulled the trigger, given her stroke-related disabilities. And was the gunpowder burn on her left hand the result of a struggle to stop the gun from going off? Further investigation uncovered an affair the judge had been having with his long-time secretary and their plan to move in together – motive enough, they concluded, for him to kill his spouse, who required constant care and attention.
Seven months later, on June 15, 2010, Mr. Delisle was arrested and charged with first-degree murder and with the possession of an unregistered weapon.
Jacques Delisle died on Aug. 10 at the age of 89.Jocelyn Bernier/The Canadian Press
All of a sudden, he found himself on the other side of the law upon which he had built his career. All of a sudden, he was an accused who vehemently professed his innocence and trusted that the evidence and the system would exonerate him.
To argue the case, Mr. Delisle turned to Jacques Larochelle, a criminal lawyer whose previous clients included Hells Angels leader Maurice (Mom) 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.
They made an odd pair, Mr. Delisle and Mr. Larochelle, the austere, cold judge and the eloquent, fiery defence lawyer who never gave up on a client, no matter how heinous the charges might have been. The plan was for the former judge to take the stand but at the last minute, he opted not to. He told The Fifth Estate’s Mark Kelley that he made the choice in order to protect his children, who did not want him to reveal publicly that he had helped Ms. Rainville kill herself.
“That was not a smart decision to make,” Mr. Delisle said. “That was a sentimental decision I made. I thought of my family first.”
In the summer of 2012, the jury found Mr. Delisle guilty of first-degree murder, a verdict carrying a mandatory life sentence with a minimum period of 25 years before he would be eligible to seek parole. His appeal to the court he had served on was dismissed, as was his application for leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada.
“When we charged him, he was guilty. That was it,” Crown prosecutor François Godin would later tell CBC’s The Fifth Estate.
And so, Mr. Delisle disappeared behind the walls of Archambault penitentiary in Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines, telling Mr. Kelley that he managed to survive by doling out legal advice to other hardcore inmates.
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.
The three men met for the first time at Sainte-Anne-des-Plaines in late 2015. “Mr. Delisle was a very patrician man, courteous and polite,” Mr. Lockyer recalled. “They presented me with a case based on poor forensic evidence. The powder burn, for example, was consistent with a self-inflicted wound.”
As Mr. Lockyer dove further into the case, reading files that had to be translated at great cost, he determined that the autopsy and ballistics evidence were missing key elements – things such a photograph of Ms. Rainville’s brain, and samples of the bullet that passed through it.
The assumption, it seemed, was that with her limited mobility, she could not have fired the gun in the first place; that because Mr. Delisle was having an affair, he wanted to rid himself of the spouse who needed constant care.
“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.”
That same year, desperate to clear the air, Mr. Delisle sat down with investigative teams from CBC and Radio-Canada to share his account of what happened. The camera revealed an old man broken down by prison, thin, with sunken cheeks and shadows under his eyes.
He dismissed a question about his affair, saying lots of people had them.
“In my heart, [Ms. Rainville] was still my love but in my life, she wasn’t the same any more,” he told Mr. Kelley. “I never saw Nicole smile after the fall that broke her hip.”
He had owned the handgun for decades, he said, a gift from a friend. When she asked him to get it for her, to load it, he said he begged her not to. He told her that everyone still loved her and to think of their children.
“She said, ‘Jacques, leave me alone,’” he recalled in a steady voice. “She said, ‘Give me one hour.’”
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.
“It’s in my DNA to take cases like this seriously,” said Mr. Lametti, now in private practice in Montreal. “I felt the process was worth another look.”
The application went before the justice department’s Criminal Conviction Review Group, which recommended it be refused, but Mr. Lametti was not satisfied. To him, there were clear problems with the evidence; when the independent counsel he usually turned to for advice, former Supreme Court justice Morris Fish, recused himself from considering the merits of the case because he had sat with Mr. Delisle on the Appeal Court bench, he obtained two opinions from former jurists of equal standing, who came to the same conclusions he did: There were problems with the evidence.
In April, 2021, Mr. Lametti ordered a new trial for Mr. Delisle, who, after nine years behind bars, was released on bail. The minister’s decision unleashed a torrent of criticism that would become uncomfortably public three years later, after the former judge pleaded guilty to one charge of manslaughter and was sentenced to time already served plus a day.
“We still don’t understand how the minister could have been convinced,” said Patrick Michel, the head of the province’s Directorate of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions, who is concerned about the impact of this decision on public confidence in the justice system.
He said the decision “not only discredits the administration of justice, it also discredits the review process for wrongful convictions.”
Mr. Lametti is still bemused by the criticism, noting that courts in Canada are not infallible. “I never said Mr. Delisle was guilty or innocent,” he remarked. “A Superior Court found him guilty, and then an Appeal Court. But courts found Guy Paul Morin, David Milgaard and Stephen Truscott guilty, too – and they were wrong.
“I don’t understand why I was vilified.”
(The experience also spurred Mr. Lametti to introduce legislation that would streamline the review process by creating an independent body to assess cases more quickly and fairly. Named for David Milgaard, who spent 23 years in prison for a murder he did not commit, and his mother, Joyce Milgaard, the legislation was inspired by a similar law in the U.K. and is currently before the Canadian Senate.)
Mr. Lockyer says that Mr. Lametti deserves “huge credit” for what he did.
“He knew it would be politically unpopular,” the lawyer said. “Yet, he made the courageous and right decision.”
In the end, Mr. Delisle faded from public view, dying in obscurity. He told Mr. Kelley that whenever he visited his wife’s grave, he asked if he did the right thing by giving her the loaded and cocked pistol.
“I think I did the right thing in response to Nicole’s request,” he said. “But I didn’t want the family to know what happened – that I helped Nicole to commit suicide.”
Throughout the trial and beyond, Mr. Delisle’s adult children, Élène and Jean, quietly supported him. Upon his release from prison in 2021, his daughter told Radio-Canada that he should be left in peace – that he had already paid greatly for something he did not do. Mr. Delisle also leaves several grandchildren.