Adele Sorella is a free woman forever. The Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP) will not appeal against the decision to acquit a Laval resident accused of murdering his young daughters, Sabrina and Amanda, in 2009.
After two trials, at the end of which he was found guilty of murder by a jury, M.Me Sorella was ultimately acquitted by Superior Court Judge Miriam LaChance last December.
The magistrate found that the Crown had not met its burden of demonstrating that the mother was in fact the author of the two murders because the evidence was flawed.
no fault of law
The acquittal appears to indicate that the DPCP conducted a rigorous analysis of the reasons for the verdict.
“While this decision was not expected, in light of the applicable rules of law, the DPCP has concluded that it cannot appeal this case,” he said in an email. He emphasizes that to appeal the decision, they must raise an error of law, and “mere disagreement is not sufficient grounds”.
After spending 15 years in court, Adele Sorella has got justice.
Amanda, 9, and Sabrina, 8, were found dead on the playroom floor of the family home in Laval on 31 March 2009. There was foam at his mouth, but there were no signs of violence on his body. , Forensic toxicology experts did not detect “any substance likely to contribute to death” in his blood. The medical examiner was unable to determine his medical cause of death, but after a process of eliminating all other possible causes, they concluded that he died of asphyxiation.
Are the murders linked to organized crime?
The Crown argued that the mother had a “special opportunity” to commit the murders that morning. It was argued that she wanted to commit mass suicide, that is, she wanted to take her own life by killing her children. Miriam Lachance did not accept this theory: All told, she loved her children and they “were everything to her,” the judge said as she read her verdict in a courtroom at Laval’s courthouse in December. He said that children were not targeted in his three previous suicide attempts.
The defense had always claimed that another possibility existed: that the two children were killed by a member of organized crime as a form of retaliation. Because his father, Giuseppe De Vito, was an Italian mafia boss. At the time of his daughters’ deaths, he had been on the run for three years, wanted by the police. A few years after his arrest, he was eventually found dead in his prison cell due to cyanide poisoning.
This thesis of a suspicious third party is therefore neither “far-fetched nor hypothetical”, Judge Lachance determined.