MONTREAL — A judge spared from jail a man who had tried to end the life of his severely ailing wife, the second instance this year where Quebec courts have shown clemency in cases of assisted suicide.
André Bergeron, 47, of Sherbrooke, Que., was arrested in 2005 after police and paramedics found his wife, Marielle Houle, 44, unconscious at their suburban home. She died three days later.
Mr. Bergeron, who was initially charged with attempted murder, pleaded guilty in April to a reduced charge of aggravated assault endangering the life of his wife. Quebec Court Judge Danielle Côté ruled yesterday that Mr. Bergeron should be sentenced to three years of probation.
Judge Côté said she would have ordered a jail term but “for the exceptional and particular tragic circumstances in his case, such as the devotion André Bergeron displayed throughout his shared life with Marielle Houle.”
Among the mitigating circumstances she cited were the fact that Mr. Bergeron assumed his wife's home care for 20 years and refused until last year to acquiesce to her repeated requests to die rather than end up in an institution.
“His act was taken not because the accused had come to consider his duty a burden but as a gesture of love for the victim, to free her of her sufferings and preserve her dignity,” Judge Côté wrote in her 19-page ruling.
The court had heard that Mr. Bergeron was in a deep depression at the time he tried to end Ms. Houle's life.
On July 7, 2005, Mr. Bergeron placed magnets over her pacemaker, then gave her a stronger-than-prescribed patch of the opiate Fentanyl. He also planned to kill himself. However, seeing that she hadn't died right away, he called 911.
The judge also said that while Ms. Houle's death was imminent because of her poor health, the Crown was unable to connect Mr. Bergeron's acts to her death.
After the sentencing yesterday, Mr. Bergeron told reporters he wishes only “that no one else goes through what I went through.”
In January, a judge in Montreal gave a similar sentence to a 60-year-old woman, also named Marielle Houle, who had pleaded guilty to assisting in the 2004 suicide of her son Charles Fariala, who had multiple sclerosis.
The more recent case took place in Sherbrooke, 160 kilometres southeast of Montreal, where Mr. Bergeron had worked as an orderly at the local community health centre, where he met Ms. Houle.
He eventually quit his job to take care of her full-time.
Ms. Houle had Friedreich's ataxia, an incurable genetic disorder. Relatives said she was racked with spasms, losing her sight and her hearing and refusing food and medication, saying she wanted to die.
Testifying at his pre-sentencing hearing, Mr. Bergeron burst into tears, saying “I had planned on departing with Marielle. . . .” He also spoke of the lack of support from the health system. He said he had tried to give Ms. Houle home care as long as possible until the workload grew too heavy for one man to bear.
“I've been 18 years in the network and I know it wasn't possible to get more help” from the local community clinic, he said.
Both his relatives and the family of Ms. Houle portrayed Mr. Bergeron as a caring husband. In her testimony, Ms. Houle's sister Céline called him “a saint. It's unbelievable all he did for her. I don't hold it against him, what he did. I am rather grateful.”
Members of both families said Ms. Houle had often insisted she did not want to end up like her sister, Monique, who died of the same illness at age 46 in a chronic-care facility.
Mr. Bergeron was liable to a maximum of 14 years behind bars. However, he had no prior criminal record and the circumstances of his case made it unlikely he would get the maximum sentence. The Crown, while urging Judge Côté not to trivialize what happened, hadn't suggested a specific sentence.
“You can't spend 20 years with someone you don't love,” Mr. Bergeron said yesterday as he left the courthouse.
