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 wasread 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 northon the one lane open to traffic on the southbound side of the highway.She pulled a U-turn between the orange cones separatingtraffic, in order to take theGeorges-Muir exit on the other side of the highway.

According to an expert witness for the defence,Drolet had beenriding his motorcycle at134 km/hmoments 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'sflashing lights just before she turned left.

Morin'spartner, who was sitting in the passenger seat siftingthrough paperwork, looked up and noticed the motorcycle seconds before the collision, lettingout a scream to warn Morin, according to testimony recountedin the judge's ruling.

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

Rousseau said his task was not to rule on thetragic consequences of the move, but rather on its legality. He ruled thatMorin had had the visibility needed to performa U-turn.

'Botched investigation': defence lawyer

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

Patrick Ouelletwas in an unmarked police cruiser,tailing a suspectatmore than 100 km/hin a 50 km/h zone, when hestruck and killed NicholasThorne-Belance.

"My colleague, understandably, determined his driving was dangerous andsignificantly 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 constabletook all the necessaryprecautions before making the U-turn.

During the trial, Morinsaid 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.

Herlawyer, Jean-FranoisBertrand, said he had always argued there were no grounds for any criminal charges against his client.

"We always believed the investigation by the Sret du Qubec 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 histeam 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