- The trial of Bernard Preynat, tried before the Criminal Court of Lyon for sexual assaults on minors, will end on Friday.
- Part of the third day was devoted to pleadings by the civil parties who demand a "heavy penalty".
" Do not be mistaken. This man had organized a real system of provision of children to abuse them at will. Not tens, not hundreds, but thousands of children have been delivered at his mercy. ” When pleading, Emmanuelle Haziza, one of the lawyers for the civil parties, drives the point home before demanding "a heavy penalty".
The trial of Bernard Preynat, former priest of the diocese of Lyon tried for sexual assaults on minors, will end on Friday. “This week, you have not released your speech, your conscience. But mass has not yet been said. You still have the opportunity, since you will speak last, to confess, ”she continues, fixing the defendant, shoulders hunched, wedged in the back of his chair. And to talk about the journey of his client, Pierre-Emmanuel Germain-Thill: “You wiped out his life as a child, his life as an adolescent, his life as an adult. He thought he was meeting God, he met the Devil ”.
"Morbid accounting"
Before her, Jean Boudot, her colleague, chose to embark on a "morbid accounting" to establish the number of potential victims of the former priest, who confessed that he could attack "four or five children every week of camps ”and“ one or maybe almost every weekend ”. "Four to five assaults per week, over the period it's between 3,000 and 4,000," he said in court.
For the lawyer, the repeated statements of the accused assuring this week, that he had not committed any assault for thirty years, do not change anything. "The absence of offenses since 1991 is the absolute demonstration that if he had wanted to curb his impulses, he could have".
"It makes sense, even thirty years after the fact, to come before you"
The past decades should not be used as an argument to reduce the sentence that can be imposed, the civil parties argue. This trial was necessary, explains Nadia Debbache, lawyer for François Devaux. The details delivered all week to the bar on the broken lives of the victims, on their traumas were "useful for better understanding certain silences," she said. And to insist to the judges: "This exposure is useful to allow society to understand how a single attack can have a devastating effect. And why it makes sense, even thirty years after the fact, to come before you. ”
The closing statement is expected Friday, before the defense pleadings. Bernard Preynat faces up to ten years' imprisonment.
Justice
Preynat case: The "rotten and shitty life" of the victims mentioned during the trial of the former priest
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VIDEO.Preynat affair: Thirty years later, the former priest faces his victims
- Bernard Preynat
- Lyon
- pedophilia
- Justice
- Church
- Priest