A murder trial must be completely redone, in particular because of stupid French errors on the part of the judge who omitted negations in certain sentences during his instructions to the jury, the Court of Appeal has just ordered.
“The inaccuracies, even if we consider that they result from a slip of the tongue or an error in oral expression, turn out to be too numerous and they cannot be compensated by the passages where the law is correctly explained,” underlined the Court of Appeal in its judgment rendered Monday, overturning the verdicts rendered against Stéphane Blanchard.
In November 2020, he was found guilty of the premeditated murder of Jacques Choquette, killed four years earlier. Blanchard was automatically sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for 25 years at the Granby courthouse.
Jacques Choquette was killed in 2016 in Stukely-Sud, in Estrie.
Courtesy SQ
But during his oral instructions to the jury, Judge André Vincent twice failed to add negations in sentences concerning important points, namely reasonable doubt and the accused’s version.
If they had been formulated correctly, they “would not have posed any problem”, underlined the Court of Appeal.
“But that’s not what he said,” ruled judges Geneviève Marcotte, Guy Cournoyer and Peter Kalichman, ordering a new trial to be held more than four years after the first.
Guilty
According to the prosecution’s theory, Blanchard agreed to kill Jacques Choquette in exchange for $5,000 in cannabis.
The victim, an entrepreneur in the concrete field, allegedly showed up for a business meeting in November 2016, in the company of Daniel Giroux, an accomplice of Blanchard. The latter then shot Choquette in the head, killing him instantly.
The body of Jacques Choquette was allegedly left at this location in Stukely-Sud in 2016. It was finally found two years later.
Archives Courtesy of the court
In 2018, he confessed during a police interrogation and indicated the location in Stukely-Sud, in Estrie, of the victim’s body, which had never been found for two years.
Other version
But during the trial, Blanchard recanted, saying instead that he “only planned to fire a warning shot next to the victim and he did not intend to kill her.” […] The main issue during the trial involved the different versions of events given by the appellant,” we mention in the judgment made public on Monday.
The “rhetorical” questions asked by Judge Vincent during his instructions to the jury, however, went “beyond the limits”, according to the Court of Appeal.
This “carries the risk that these questions become simply a subtle way of denigrating the defense presented,” she raises.
The Court of Appeal further emphasized that Judge André Vincent gave an answer to a question from the jury which should have “been more complete” and that he should have asked for clarification regarding a second questioning of the jurors during of their deliberations.
In this case, Daniel Giroux was convicted of first degree murder during a separate trial. Another accused, Mathieu Valade-Williams, ultimately pleaded guilty to a reduced charge which earned him six years in the penitentiary.
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