One of Quebec’s worst pedophiles fired his third lawyer on Tuesday and filed a motion for a stay of proceedings at the Montreal courthouse. The 49-year-old is currently charged with possessing a GPS containing 1,200 images of child pornography while living in a federal halfway house.
Mr. X argues that the lawyers who have followed his case since 2019 have never followed their line of defense. He also claims that he was never able to speak with his lawyers more than 10 or 15 minutes before the hearings and that communications by telephone or videoconference were “extremely limited, if not non-existent”.
The accused therefore requests a stay of proceedings and his release “without delay”.
“None of the lawyers mandated by the petitioner from the beginning allowed the petitioner to have a fair and just trial [and] a full answer and defence,” he wrote in the petition he sent to the judge. Josée Bélanger, this week.
In the eight-page document, the accused also mentions the Jordan judgment even if he himself stretched the procedures by changing lawyers several times. “COVID-19, the systemic shortage of correctional officers, court clerks, justice system support staff … contributed to the alleged reasonable time of 18 months being exceeded for trials without a preliminary inquiry” , he wrote.
The trial of Mr. X was however coming to an end on Tuesday. The Crown prosecutor, Me Amélie Rivard, and the defense lawyer, Me Yann Trignac, were to present their arguments.
Mr. X was arrested in August 2019 for possession of child pornography. It was his co-roomer at the halfway house who got caught with a GPS filled with images of children and who denounced Mr. X. The device contained the image of a little girl from the entourage of Mr X.
During the trial, the Crown tried to demonstrate that this GPS did indeed belong to Mr. X. The electronic device notably recorded the movements of the accused between the halfway house where he lived in 2019 and his place of work, a chic downtown restaurant. Mr. X worked there as a dishwasher.
In the early 2000s, the trial of this sexual predator shocked Quebec. The leader of an international pedophile ring sexually assaulted his own four-year-old daughter and a little neighbor. He filmed the abuse and shared it on the internet.
At the time, Mr. X received a 15-year prison sentence and was declared a long-term offender until 2030. He was released on statutory release in December 2015 after serving two-thirds of his sentence. .
The parties will be back in court on May 31.
