Adele Sorella acquitted in 3rd trial for 2009 deaths of 2 daughters

A Quebec Superior Court judge has found Adele Sorella not guilty of killing her two daughters, Amanda, 9, and Sabrina, 8 in 2009.

Superior Court Judge Myriam Lachance delivered the decision on Monday. It was Sorella's third trial. The Laval resident had previously been convicted of first-degree murder in 2013 and then of second-degree murder in 2019, both times by juries.

The Quebec Court of Appeal overturned the two convictions after her defence team appealed, claiming the judge in each trial made errors when instructing the jury members.

In the courtroom, Sorella let out a gasp and said "Oh my God!" as Lachance read her decision. Friends and family embraced her. 

Lachance's decision cited the lack of evidence against Sorella. The Crown had argued she had the exclusive opportunity to kill her daughters. Lachance agreed that she did have the opportunity to kill them, but the judge said certain pieces of the evidence led her to doubt that Sorella had the ability to do so. 

The Crown's argument relied on circumstantial evidence that Lachance described in her judgment as a "constellation of theoretical possibilities explaining the cause and circumstances of the victims' deaths," some of which "remain speculative, which makes them inadmissible as definitive proof."

The crux of the defence arguments in the two trials was that there was no direct evidence linking Sorella to the deaths of Amanda and Sabrina. Lawyers Guy and Pierre Poupart told the court that someone else was likely behind the killings.

Long and sensational process

Details in the previous trials bordered on the sensational at times. In March 2009, family members found the bodies of Amanda and Sabrina, lying side by side on the floor of the playroom in the Sorella home.

Hours later, first responders were called to an accident in rural Laval where Adele Sorella had driven her car into a utility pole, apparently by accident. She was later arrested and prosecutors charged her with murder.

She testifed at her second trial that she recalled being with her children in the morning and then leaving for an appointment. She remembered the crash but the time in-between remains a blank.

Defence lawyers have argued she was in a state of dissociation at the time of the girls' deaths, whether or not she had caused them.

At the time, Sorella had been single-parenting the two girls. Three years earlier, police officers arrived at the family home to arrest her husband, Giuseppe De Vito, in a sweep of organized crime. De Vito disappeared, telling Sorella that he was not involved in organized crime and was going to lie low until he could clear his name.

Sorella testified that the two remained in contact using a hidden mobile phone, and that she and the girls did visit De Vito on two occasions, outside of Laval.

He was eventually arrested while living with another woman, convicted of drug trafficking, and then died of cyanide poisoning while serving his sentence in a maximum-security prison.

Pathology reports on the two girls found that they died of asphyxiation. Crown prosecutors pointed to a hyperbaric chamber that De Vito had bought to treat Sabrina's juvenile arthritis. The prosecutors alleged that Sorella had "exclusive opportunity" to kill the girls, and that she used the chamber to suffocate them. However a forensic analysis found no DNA evidence that the girls had been in the chamber.

Sorella did not testify in her first trial, but did take the stand in her own defence in the second trial.

This third trial was also conducted in an exceptional manner. In a bid to expedite the proceedings, the Crown and the defence agreed to present the testimony from the second trial to Judge Lachance. There was no jury for this trial.