One of the highest French magistrates, François Molins, vigorously rejected Saturday the trial in "laxity" against justice, facing the controversy over the decision to declare criminally irresponsible the murderer of the sixty-year-old Jewish Sarah Halimi.

“Obviously, justice does not issue a license to kill!

", Rebelled the Attorney General at the Court of Cassation in an interview with the newspaper

Le Monde

, for whom to assimilate this decision, taken" in accordance with the rule of law ", to" a license to kill Jews in France is unbearable ".

"There is nothing to say in a general and without nuance that justice is lax," he added.

In mid-April, the Court of Cassation confirmed the anti-Semitic nature of this crime, committed in 2017 in Paris, but confirmed the impossibility of organizing a trial of the murderer, a heavy user of cannabis, given the abolition of his discernment. during the facts.

According to the seven psychiatric experts who examined him, Kobili Traore was in the throes of a "delusional puff" when he killed his 65-year-old neighbor, Lucie Attal, also known as Sarah Halimi.

Macron in the fray

The impossibility of a trial created a lively controversy and pushed President Emmanuel Macron to demand "a change in the law" on criminal liability. "The emotion aroused by this decision undoubtedly reveals that the law is not adapted", admitted François Molins, while warning the parliament against the temptation to "legislate in the emergency and under the blow of the emotion ”.

Leaving his reservation, the magistrate wanted to explain why there is no contradiction in law to consider this crime as anti-Semitic, while attributing it to a criminally irresponsible author. "Since a reform of 2008, judges rule first on the existence of the offense and its imputability to the perpetrator, which implies that the offense is qualified with regard to the elements of context," he said. - he detailed, and "secondly, on the issue of criminal responsibility". Before this reform, "the penal code denied, in the event of irresponsibility due to the abolition of discernment, the very existence of the crime or misdemeanor", he recalled. A situation "unbearable for the victims".

The magistrate also protested against the “erroneous shortcut”, according to which the murderer's drug use would be the cause of his criminal irresponsibility.

"It is the abolition of discernment when taking action, and that alone, which induces penal irresponsibility", insisted François Molins.

“However, anyone who consumes alcohol or cannabis does not have a delirious puff and does not see their discernment abolished.

"

Society

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  • Drug

  • Anti-semitism

  • Murder

  • Francois Molins

  • Justice