The pain, the sadness, the regrets, all of this existed only on one side of the courtroom, Wednesday in Mâcon. That of the family of Emma, a 14-year-old girl, stabbed several times by her boyfriend in June 2022. The latter, suffering from a mental disorder preventing him from experiencing emotions, was sentenced to thirteen years of imprisonment. prison. This is “the maximum” possible, reacted after the conviction Patrick Uzan, lawyer for Emma’s parents, recognizing the “impaired discernment” from which the young boy suffers. “It’s a consistent verdict. The family will be able to calm down,” added the lawyer, ruling out an appeal.
“It didn’t do anything to him. He has nothing, no feelings. This boy is empty,” however, lamented Nathalie, Emma’s mother, quoted by her lawyer. The teenager is “psychologically incapable of feeling anything”, admitted his lawyer, Me Amélie Gemma, saying she could not yet comment on a possible appeal. “The court accepted the impairment of discernment, that’s what I wanted,” she said, also highlighting the difficult family environment in which the boy lived. His mother is a former alcoholic and his father was sentenced in 2022 to eight months in prison for beating him.
“Schizoid Personality Disorder”
The prosecution had requested thirteen years in prison for murder against the accused, currently aged 15. He faced a maximum sentence of 20 years but the public prosecutor and the court took into account his young age and his mental disorders, said the lawyers for the parties in the trial, which took place behind closed doors. The Mâcon children’s court, ruling as a criminal, attached his sentence to significant obligations of care. During the trial, which began Monday, experts took turns describing “the schizoid personality disorder” from which he suffers, a state characterized by detachment and general disinterest.
On June 9, 2022 in Clessé (Saône-et-Loire), a typical wine-growing village in Southern Burgundy, Emma’s body was discovered on the public highway near her former primary school. The remains of the teenager, a 4th grade student, showed numerous wounds and a knife still stuck in her neck. The next day, Emma’s boyfriend was arrested, quickly admitting that, during a late-night meeting, he had stabbed Emma three times in the neck with a knife hidden up until then in his sleeve.
Emma had “tried to flee, but the suspect (had) tried to strangle her before stabbing her again,” the prosecution indicated shortly after the incident. “It’s a terrible case,” said Mr. Uzan. “But it has educational virtues: middle and high schools will need to warn the parents when they learn of something dangerous that concerns a child. If Emma’s parents had been warned, this tragedy would never have happened,” he assured. The teenager’s mother had asked that the defendant be locked up, saying she did not want “that he could start again and that another family would go through what we went through.”