The court of cassation on Wednesday annulled the acquittal pronounced by the Court of Appeal of Reims at the end of 2020 of the neighbor of little Tony, prosecuted for non-denunciation of ill-treatment in the death of the child under the blows of his stepfather in 2016.
A new trial will be held before the Reims Court of Appeal.
The Court of Cassation agrees with the arguments of the general prosecutor’s office who had appealed against this release. “The Court of Appeal distinguished between physical violence, which the neighbor had never witnessed, and psychological violence which the neighbor heard. We must take into account all the violence, ”explained Advocate General Jacques Louvier.
He hearing the insults and humiliations
Little Tony’s neighbor has never hidden that he regularly heard from his apartment the many insults and humiliations to which little Tony was regularly the victim from his stepfather.
“If the Court of Appeal also stated that the defendant had the feeling that the child was mistreated and assumed that he was struck by his mother’s companion, she could not without contradicting herself, estimate that the actions she thus noted constituted only educational failures and not ill-treatment ”, argues thus the Court of Cassation in its judgment Wednesday of which AFP obtained a copy.
“Everyone in the building heard Tony cry”
In October 2019, the neighbor had already been released by the Criminal Court of Reims. “Everyone in the building has, at one point, heard Tony cry,” said the president of the tribunal. The prosecution had appealed.
The stepfather of little Tony, author of the fatal blows, was sentenced to 20 years of criminal imprisonment by the Marne Assize Court in February 2020. The mother of the child martyr was sentenced to four years of imprisonment. imprisonment, one of which was suspended. The general prosecutor’s office appealed against this decision.