A father was sentenced on Tuesday to an eight-month suspended prison sentence for wanting to take justice into his own hands. Tried before the Roanne Criminal Court, he was prosecuted for having beaten up the alleged attacker of his 6-year-old daughter. Three other people, who came to lend him a hand on the evening of the events, appeared at his side.
The man, a 28-year-old delivery driver, was the only one of the four defendants to recognize the beatings on the teenager. The victim, a 16-year-old unaccompanied minor, had been hit several times with a stick and an electric cable, which had caused him a ten-day ITT.
At the helm, the father of the family had explained to have “farted a cable”, under “the blow of emotion”. On October 22, around 3 a.m., he attacked the young man, suspected of having entered his little girl’s room in the middle of the night in order to sexually assault her.
A doomed neighbor
Evoking a “lynching”, the public prosecutor of Roanne Abdelkrim Grini had accused him of having “worn the habit of a vigilante” and had requested 18 months in prison, including 6 to 9 months of probation.
Judged alongside him, a neighbor was sentenced to a firm six-month sentence, which can be adjusted by wearing an electronic bracelet at home. This 30-year-old was found guilty of “violence in a meeting with a weapon” as a legal recidivism. Two other thirty-somethings, who were there when the police arrived shortly after the incident, were “released for the benefit of the doubt”.
In the days following the punitive expedition, the case stirred up reactions within the government and in the media, fueling debates on the right to take justice into one’s own hands.
For his part, the teenager did not attend the trial for security reasons. He remains in pre-trial detention after his indictment for sexual assault. The latter denies any assault, while the girl’s mother claims to have surprised him at home, on the night of Thursday 20 to Friday 21 October. A neighbor also recognized him as he was walking through the neighborhood that night.