• Mathieu Danel was sentenced to thirty years in prison on Thursday after his appeal trial by the Assize Court of Lozère.

  • On June 19, 2018, he killed a hitchhiker before denouncing himself two days later, explaining that he wanted to "know the feeling of taking life".

  • The sentence is less severe than during his first trial in January before the Assizes of Gard, where he received life imprisonment, accompanied by a 22-year security sentence.

Mathieu Danel was sentenced to thirty years in prison on Thursday after his appeal trial by the Assize Court of Lozère.

This sentence was accompanied by a security period of twenty years and a treatment order.

It is less heavy than that pronounced during a first judgment before the assizes of the Gard in January.

He was then sentenced to life imprisonment, together with a 22-year security sentence.

On June 21, 2018, this hitherto uneventful man, then 23 years old, went to the police station in his hometown of Montélimar to confess to a homicide committed two days earlier in Sommières, in the Gard.

After dining with his future victim, Claire Reynier, a 39-year-old woman he had hitchhiked, he killed her with 17 very violent blows from a hunting dagger purchased three weeks earlier.

Recognized premeditation

During the trial, he repeated that he wanted "to know the feeling of taking life" and to see if he would experience pleasure or disgust from it, he tried to explain, saying that he did not ultimately felt nothing.

On Wednesday, before the Assizes of Lozère, in Mende, the Advocate General had demanded against him the confirmation of his life prison sentence.

He had asked to combine this perpetuity with a security period of 18 years.

After a five-hour deliberation, the Assize Court of Lozère therefore again found Mathieu Danel guilty of premeditated murder, however reducing his sentence.

Tears at the mention of his victim

Since the opening of his second trial on Monday, the accused had repeated that he had only decided at the last minute, even though he had had the fantasy of committing murder for years.

“The verdict is better than at first instance, it's rare.

It is to put [to his] credit, “said his lawyer, Jérôme Arnal.

"It offers him a prospect of coming back to life, of a future," he added.

While he had always been extremely cold since his arrest four years ago, in front of the investigators as at his first trial, Mathieu Danel had shed his first tears on Wednesday when referring to his victim.

The fruit according to him of the therapy started in prison, which allows him to begin to feel emotions.

“I know I still have time to continue this therapy.

Claire, I took sixty years from her,” he said.


Justice

Lozère: Perpetuity required against the man who wanted to "know the feeling" of killing

Justice

Gard: Life imprisonment for the murderer who wanted to "know the feeling" of killing

  • Justice

  • Occitania

  • Languedoc Roussillon

  • Assassination