FLQ member sentenced in bombing
Pierre Vallieres was sentenced to life imprisonment yesterday after an Assizes jury had convicted him of manslaughter in the FLQ time-bomb death of a woman on May 5, 1966.
He had stood trial since Feb. 26 on a murder charge but the jury brought in the reduced verdict after deliberating for nearly four hours.
The 28-year-old ex-newspaperman seemed to take the verdict calmly. But he let loose a vitriolic spate of abuse of the court when he was asked by Justice Yves Leduc if he had anything to say before sentence.
Justice Leduc interrupted him with a warning against committing contempt of court early in the fiery outburst, but he continued on his abusive course for several minutes before the court cut in to impose the life sentence.
“In view of your bellicose attitude,” said the judge, “I have no alternative but to impose the maximum penalty of imprisonment for life.”
“If you consider that you have not had a fair trial, you can go to appeal,” Justice Leduc told him.
Vallieres, a small, highly articulate man who had conducted his own defence, barked out: “We will go to appeal immediately.”
A large crowd of bearded youths and a fair sprinkling
“We will go to appeal immediately.”
FLQ MEMBER PIERRE VALLIERES, UPON BEING SENTENCED
of young women had massed in front of the Queen’s Bench entrance during the afternoon, but the door was locked and the public was barred even when the verdict was returned.
The accused was charged with complicity in the death of Miss Thérèse Morin, 64, an office employee of H.B. La Grenade Ltée, shoe company, which had been fighting a strike for more than a year before the bomb exploded.
In the indictment, Vallieres’s complicity in the death was based on the allegation that he counselled, incited or encouraged “by his writings, acts, or attitudes” the explosion of the bomb.
The prosecution, represented by Crown prosecutors Maurice Bourassa and Louis Paradis, made evidence that the bomb was delivered to the shoe plant by a 17-year-old Front de libération du Québec partisan.
Serge Demers, 22, who is serving a long prison term for the crime, told the jury it was he who prepared the dynamite device and instructed the schoolboy to take it to the plant office.
Vallieres was shown to have been closely associated with Demers and other members of the FLQ who are now in prison.
The juvenile recalled that he had met Vallieres a few months before the crime, when the accused drew his attention to an article advocating the use of bombs and other forms of violence to achieve the aims of the movement.
In his two-hour charge to the jurymen yesterday morning, Justice Leduc pointed out that the article in question bore the byline of the accused under his underground pseudonym.
The court also drew attention to other documents before the jury and connected with the accused. It was up to them to decide, he said, whether these documents constituted links in the chain of circumstantial evidence leading to a conclusion of incitement to the explosion.
He referred to the evidence that Vallieres, using an assumed name, had rented a chalet near St. Alphonse de Juliette just before the explosion. A few months later, a cache of dynamite was found buried nearby.
In his violent protest against his conviction, Vallieres, an avowed member of the left-wing revolutionary separatist FLQ, charged that the judge had not based his charge to the jury on the facts.
He insisted he was innocent of complicity in the bomb incident and he complained that he had not been tried on the facts but on his writing, “some for which were not proved to be mine.”