"A former Quebec Court of Appeal judge who was convicted of murdering his wife four years ago is a step closer to winning a new trial. Jacques Delisle is serving a life term after being convicted of first degree murder in the death in 2009 of Marie-Nicole Rainville. At his trial Delisle had maintained that Rainville had killed herself. The Journal de Montreal reports this morning that the federal Criminal Conviction Review has agreed to study what are described as new elements of the case that were not available to Delisle's trial or subsequent appeal. The 81 year old Delisle is expected to apply for bail next week."
See previous post (May 26, 2016) of this Blog at the link below: "Globe and Mail reports that new forensic evidence suggests the 81-year-old retired Quebec Court of Appeal judge has been wrongly convicted of murder: "New forensic evidence suggests the only Canadian judge convicted of murder is innocent and that his wife’s death from a gunshot wound was suicide, his lawyer says in a recent request for a Department of Justice investigation of the case."..."He has always maintained that his wife, Nicole Rainville, shot herself, though last year he told the CBC that he provided her with the loaded pistol that fired the fatal shot. Ms. Rainville was suicidal after a stroke left her right side paralyzed."..."Three forensics experts have submitted reports to the department’s Criminal Conviction Review Group attesting that the fatal bullet in Ms. Rainville’s death was fired from a 90-degree angle rather than the 30-degree angle posited by the forensic pathologist in Mr. Delisle’s trial, suggesting suicide rather than murder. The experts point to fractures on the right side of her skull that indicate the bullet travelled horizontally from left to right before ricocheting to its final resting place in the back right side of her brain. The trial pathologist who performed Ms. Rainville’s autopsy missed these fractures, as well as bullet fragments in the right side of her brain. He also apparently failed to dissect the brain, inferring the bullet’s trajectory from the entry wound and its endpoint. In his memorandum to the minister, Mr. Lockyer argues that these errors led directly to Mr. Delisle’s conviction and constitute a likely miscarriage of justice, which should trigger a formal investigation. “He just connected two dots, without realizing there was a third dot in the middle, so he didn’t look elsewhere,” Mr. Lockyer said of the trial pathologist, André Bourgault." Reporter Eric Andrew-Gee;
