Why one Montreal man convicted of quadruple murder may be closer to freedom

Genevieve Beauchemin has more on how a Quebec man convicted of killing four people decades ago might be innocent after spending more than 30 years in prison.

A letter could be a turning point in the case of a Montreal man convicted of a quadruple murder.

Daniel Jolivet has always claimed his innocence and Quebec’s Crown prosecutors’ office wrote his lawyer, saying that there are grounds to believe Jolivet did not get a fair trial.

“We now believe that the allegation of miscarriage of justice against Mr. Jolivet is not without merit,” wrote prosecutor Benoit Lauzon after a months’ long review of the case.

Nicholas St-Jacques is a lawyer with Quebec’s Innocence Project and is advocating for Jolivet. He says he received the letter on June 27 and has forwarded it to Justice Minister Sean Fraser’s office.

“A specialized unit of the Crown’s office basically says that it recognizes that in the case of Mr. Jolivet, there was a disclosure problem,” said St-Jacques. “Basically, there were some elements that were not disclosed in the case. And these elements might, if they had been disclosed, they could have had a significant impact on the outcome of the trial, or the fairness of the trial.”

Essentially, St-Jacques explains, the Crown’s office recognized that there were likely sufficient elements in the case to order a new trial.

‘I am innocent’

Jolivet has spent half his life behind bars, and in 2023, CTV’s W5 spoke to him at a prison in Laval, Que., north of Montreal. At the time, he detailed his years of petitioning the justice system, including four submissions to the Criminal Conviction Review Group (CCRG). All have been turned down.

“I want (Canadians) to know I am innocent,” he said at the time. “Because I have been incarcerated for over 30 years, and if it can happen to me, it can happen to them.”

Jolivet was convicted of four murders that happened in 1992, in Brossard, Montreal’s south shore. Drug traffickers Denis Lemieux and Francois Leblanc were gunned down, along with two women, Nathalie Beauregard and Catherine Morin, who have always believed to have simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Jolivet was a career criminal. He was convicted for robbery at age 18 and had gone to jail four times before he was sentenced in the murders. But he says he was not a violent man.

“I never hurt nobody,” he said in 2023.

‘I was at a loss’

The evidence against him in the case of the murders rested on the testimony of a former police officer named Claude Riendeau, who turned into a criminal, then eventually an informant. But Pierre Beland has spent years and written a book poking holes in the case.

“The other day I spoke on the phone with Daniel from prison,” said Beland. “He said, ‘You know, I have been in jail for 12,000 days.’”

Beland is the one who contacted Quebec’s Crown prosecutors’ office, writing a series of letters over several months in 2024, and eventually sending a copy of his book, the Twelfth Juror, in the wake of another rejection from the CCRG.

“I was at a loss,” he said. “I was seeing a brick wall, without any windows or doors or openings.”

Then he saw a television interview with the director of the Crown prosecutors’ office and decided to write. He says the response they eventually sent back is evidence the office has grounds to believe Jolivet may not have received a fair trial.

“They’re pretty definitive about that,” said Beland. “The prosecution at the time did not do true discovery, they did not pass on to the defence a ton of documents, essentially every document that was in favour of Jolivet, anything showing Jolivet was innocent, they never gave this to the defence.”

The Crown, however, cannot order a new trial.

The file is now in the hands of the justice minister. The department sent a statement to CTV News.

“The Criminal Code provides the minister of justice with the authority to review a conviction for an offence under an Act of Parliament to determine whether there has been a miscarriage of justice, and the responsibility for such cases rests with the Criminal Conviction Review Group (CCRG),” the statement read.

But the department also wrote that it could not provide further comment, as the “preliminary assessment decisions of the CCRG in Mr. Jolivet’s case are currently being challenged in Federal Court.”

“We don’t understand the position of the minister of justice,” said St-Jacques. “We believe he could act, and we hope that he will do so, because every day that he doesn’t act is another day with an innocent person in prison.”