Convicted killer Sorella granted bail ahead of second murder trial
Adele Sorella will be released on bail while she awaits her second trial on charges she murdered her two young daughters.
During a hearing at the Laval courthouse on Friday, Quebec Superior Court Justice Mario Longpré agreed that Sorella, 51, can be released after he was informed the Crown did not object to her being granted bail.
Sorella was granted bail in 2010, while she awaited her first trial.
She was found guilty on June 24, 2013, of the first-degree murders of her daughters, Sabrina, 8, and Amanda, 9.
She respected her bail conditions in full for more than two years while she awaited her first trial.
She had been incarcerated at a federal penitentiary since 2013 but, on Dec. 4, the Quebec Court of Appeal overturned the jury’s verdicts based on four different issues, including errors made by Superior Court Justice Carol Cohen when she instructed the jury.
Three Quebec Court of Appeal judges who weighed in on the case were unanimous in their decision, making it unlikely the Crown will ask the Supreme Court of Canada to review it.
On Friday, Longpré ordered that a relative of Sorella post a $25,000 bond before she is released.
He also imposed a series of conditions, including that she reside in Quebec.
Sorella’s daughters were found dead inside the family’s home in Laval on March 31, 2009. The Crown’s theory in the first murder trial was that Sorella had somehow convinced her daughters to remain inside a hyperbaric chamber until they died of asphyxiation.
Sorella had purchased the chamber in 2008 to treat Sabrina’s juvenile rheumatoid arthritis but the jury heard evidence the girls liked to pretend it was a tent they could camp out in. A pathologist testified that the girls would have fallen asleep before they died and that the method left no trace of how they were killed.
Sorella was not home when Sabrina and Amanda’s bodies were discovered.
Police found her the following day after she crashed her car into a utility pole in Laval.
At the time of the murders, Sorella’s husband, Mafia leader Giuseppe De Vito, had been on the lam for three years while wanted in a cocaine smuggling case.
He was arrested in 2010 and was subsequently sentenced to a 15-year prison term after he was convicted in the cocaine smuggling case.
He died of cyanide poisoning on July 8, 2013, inside a federal penitentiary.
Sorella’s case will return to court on Jan. 17 to possibly set a date for her new trial.