Man convicted of four Brossard murders to learn Friday if he will be released while case is reviewed

A man who has served 33 years behind bars for four murders he claims he didn’t commit will find out on Friday if he can be released while the federal government reviews his case for a possible wrongful conviction.

During a hearing at the Montreal courthouse on Wednesday, Quebec Superior Court Justice Lyne Décarie heard arguments on whether Daniel Jolivet, 68, can be released on bail while his case is reviewed.

He has been eligible for full parole for since 2017, but the Parole Board of Canada has turned him down a few times, most recently on Oct. 22, as reported by The Gazette. The following day, the federal Justice Department’s criminal conviction review group decided to investigate Jolivet’s case.

In June, the Quebec Crown prosecutor’s office concluded Jolivet may not have received a fair trial.

On Wednesday, a lawyer representing the prosecution said the release plan offered by Jolivet’s lawyers was acceptable. She also said the Crown would not present any evidence or witnesses to counter Jolivet’s request.

On Nov. 10, 1992, the bodies of Catherine Morin, 20, Nathalie Beauregard, 23, and François Leblanc, 32, were found inside a condo on St-Laurent Blvd. in Brossard by Leblanc’s sister. The body of the fourth victim, Denis Lemieux, 49, was discovered later the same day inside another condo in the same residential building. The victims were all shot with the same firearm, which was never recovered.

The Crown’s case against Jolivet was based in part on the testimony of an informant who told police he was with Jolivet and the male victims before they were killed and that the men were involved in a cocaine deal. The informant told police he met Jolivet after the murders at a restaurant and that he confessed to having carried out the homicides. The informant also said Jolivet told him the women were killed because they were witnesses to what happened to Leblanc.

On Wednesday, Nicolas St-Jacques, a lawyer with Projet Innocence Québec, a group that has investigated Jolivet’s case for years, said it has discovered many pieces of evidence that were never presented to the jury that convicted Jolivet. St-Jacques said the evidence discredits the testimony of the informant and suggests that a different man was present when the victims were killed.

Other evidence, St-Jacques said, suggests Jolivet was not present at the restaurant when the informant alleged that Jolivet confessed.

“It is impossible that he was at the restaurant (the morning after the murders),” St-Jacques said, adding other evidence gathered by the Sûreté du Québec called into question the reliability of a waitress who said she saw Jolivet at the restaurant on the day in question.

“There are cellphone records that were presented to the jury that show it is improbable that he was at the crime scene when the crime was logically committed,” St-Jacques said, adding an expert witness who testified in the trial only referred to a small sample of the phone records and that other records were too complicated for a jury to make sense of during the 1990s. “It is not impossible (he was at the crime scene), but it is improbable. When you put it together with all the pieces of evidence that were not divulged, it creates a reasonable doubt.”

St-Jacques told the court that if Jolivet had access to the evidence during his trial, it could have changed his strategy to not testify in his defence.

pcherry@postmedia.com

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