Adele Sorella is a free woman, for good. The Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions (DPCP) said a Laval resident accused of murdering her young daughters, Sabrina and Amanda, in 2009 will not appeal her acquittal.
After two trials in which she was convicted by a jury of murder, Mme Sorella was acquitted last December by Superior Court Judge Merriam LaChance.
The magistrate found that the Crown had not met its burden of showing that the mother was actually the author of the two murders because there were gaps in the evidence.
Not a mistake of law
After this acquittal, the DPCP undertook a rigorous analysis of the reasons for the verdict, he points out.
“Although this ruling is not as expected, in light of the applicable rules of law, the DPCP concludes that it cannot appeal this case,” he said via email. He insists that to appeal a judgment, he must raise an error of law, and that “mere dissent is not sufficient ground”.
After spending 15 years in court, Adele Sorella finally got justice.
Amanda, 9, and Sabrina, 8, were found dead on March 31, 2009, on the playroom floor of the family’s home in Laval. They foamed at the mouth, but there were no signs of violence on their bodies. . A forensic toxicology expert could not find “any substance contributing to death” in his blood. The medical examiner was unable to determine a medical cause of death, but after the process of eliminating all other possible causes, concluded that he died of asphyxiation.
Are the murders linked to organized crime?
The Crown argued that the mother had a “distinct opportunity” to commit the murder that morning. She wanted to commit an elaborate suicide, it was argued, that is, she wanted to kill her children and take her own life. Miriam LaChance did not accept this theory: Everyone said she loved her children and that they “were everything to her,” the judge declared while reading her verdict in the courtroom of the Laval courthouse in December. She added that in her three previous suicide attempts, none targeted children.
The defense always claimed that another possibility existed: that the two children were killed as revenge by a member of organized crime. Because his father, Giuseppe Di 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 of cyanide poisoning in his prison cell.
This thesis of a dubious third party is therefore neither “far-fetched nor fanciful”, Judge LaChance ruled.
To see in the video
