Quebec City police officer acquitted in fatal 2015 motorcycle crash

A Quebec City police officer has been acquitted of dangerous driving causing death for her role in a fatal 2015 crash.

Const. Isabelle Morin sobbed as the verdict was read out in a Quebec City courtroom Tuesday morning.

Jessy Drolet, 38, was killed in September 2015 after crashing his motorcycle into Morin's police cruiser.

At the time of the accident, the northbound stretch of the Laurentian Highway was closed for construction work, leaving alternate lanes open on the southbound section of the highway.

Morin was in the driver's seat of a police cruiser, heading north on the one lane open to traffic on the southbound side of the highway. She pulled a U-turn between the orange cones separating traffic, in order to take the Georges-Muir exit on the other side of the highway.

According to an expert witness for the defence, Drolet had been riding his motorcycle at 134 km/h moments before he crashed into the cruiser.

Witnesses who testified during the two-week trial said Morin, a 19-year veteran of the Quebec City police service, slowed down to a crawl and turned on the cruiser's flashing lights just before she turned left.

Morin's partner, who was sitting in the passenger seat sifting through paperwork, looked up and noticed the motorcycle seconds before the collision, letting out a scream to warn Morin, according to testimony recounted in the judge's ruling.

Quebec court Judge Pierre-L Rousseau said the manoeuvre was "unusual" but not illegal and didn't go against the highway code.

Rousseau said his task was not to rule on the tragic consequences of the move, but rather on its legality. He ruled that Morin had had the visibility needed to perform a U-turn.

'Botched investigation': defence lawyer

In his ruling, Rousseau referred to the case of a Montreal police officer who was found guilty in July of dangerous driving in the death of a five-year-old boy on Montreal's South Shore.

Patrick Ouellet was in an unmarked police cruiser, tailing a suspect at more than 100 km/h in a 50 km/h zone, when he struck and killed Nicholas Thorne-Belance.​

"My colleague, understandably, determined his driving was dangerous and significantly out of step with the usual care that is expected of a police officer under the circumstances," Rousseau wrote.

In Morin's case, the judge ruled, the police constable took all the necessary precautions before making the U-turn.

During the trial, Morin said if she found herself in the same situation again, she would likely have made the same decision, but not if she was driving her own car.

Her lawyer, Jean-François Bertrand, said he had always argued there were no grounds for any criminal charges against his client.

"We always believed the investigation by the Sûreté du Québec was botched and wasn't impartial, and that's what the judge recognized in his ruling this morning," Bertrand said.

Crown prosecutor Guy Loisel said the decision was "not what we were looking for."

He said his team would read through the 26-page ruling to see if there are grounds for appeal.

Morin is still employed with the Quebec City police force but is currently on leave.

With files from Radio-Canada's Yannick Bergeron