Fate of Adele Sorella, charged with 1st-degree murder in daughters' deaths, now in jury's hands

As they begin their deliberations, jurors in the trial of Adele Sorella will have to choose one of five possible verdicts in determining the fate of the 53-year-old Laval woman.

Sorella has pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the 2009 deaths of her two daughters, eight-year-old Sabrina and nine-year-old Amanda. 

For the six women and six men on the jury, the trial has been a marathon —  lasting just under 12 weeks.

They have heard the testimony of 51 witnesses, stopping proceedings to ask questions 44 times, which Superior Court Justice Sophie Bourque noted is a high number for any jury.

Bourque read her instructions to the jury at the Laval courthouse Wednesday.

She said jurors will have the tough job of parsing through all the evidence presented at the trial — a task made harder by the fact no official cause was determined in the girls' death.

The pathologist who conducted their autopsies said the probable cause was asphyxiation in a hyperbaric chamber that was found in Sorella's large Laval home.

The court heard Sorella's husband — Giuseppe De Vito, who died in prison in 2013 — bought the chamber to treat Sabrina's juvenile arthritis.

The girls' bodies were found without any signs of violence on the floor of their playroom by their uncle on the afternoon of March 31, 2009. Sorella was arrested hours later that night, after crashing her car into a pole.

Bourque said it has been up to Crown prosecutors Simon Lapierre and Nektarios Tzortzinas to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Sorella killed her two daughters and planned to do so.

In the Crown's final arguments Monday, Lapierre argued Sorella had the exclusive opportunity to kill Sabrina and Amanda.

Lapierre said that it would have been impossible for another person to have entered the family home and killed the two girls, as there was no evidence of a break-in or struggle.

He argued that there is no reason to think that the deaths were accidental, and he reminded the jurors of the testimony from first responders indicating that the girls were found lying side by side in their playroom, as if they had been laid there.

Defence lawyer Pierre Poupart's final arguments went on for four days last week.

Bourque said Poupart's two main points were that there is no concrete evidence Sorella killed her daughters — and that at the time of their deaths, she was in a state of pathological dissociation, as described by an expert witness for the defence, Dr. Gilles Chamberland.

However, the judge warned jurors against using that explanation as a theory that could fill voids in their timeline of events.

She also told them to discount subjective comments from lawyers.

"You can have empathy, but you must not forget that you are in the shoes of a jurist and no others," she said.

Jurors will have access to the judge's instructions in written form during their deliberations.

Those instructions include a tree branching out to five possible conclusions and the verdicts they should lead to.

In the order illustrated on the document submitted by the judge, those possible verdicts are:

• Not guilty of first-degree murder.
• Not criminally responsible for the girls' deaths.
• Not guilty of first-degree murder, but guilty of manslaughter.
• Not guilty of first-degree murder, but guilty of second-degree murder.
• Guilty of first-degree murder.