A Texas appeals court has just removed the Sword of Damocles hanging above Joseph Jean. The only Frenchman currently on death row in the United States saw his sentence commuted to life in prison on Wednesday without the possibility of release.
He was sentenced to death in January 2011 for killing two teenage girls with a baseball bat in April 2010 in Baytown near Houston, Texas. Her mother said she was “so happy” when the switch was announced. “I will be able to take him in my arms, I will be able to touch him”, was moved Lina Jean, rejoicing to be able to visit him more often.
A very long legal process
As early as August 2013, Joseph Jean’s lawyers challenged his sentence, explaining that he had an intellectual disability, a diagnosis incompatible with the death penalty since a 2002 Supreme Court decision. , neuropsychiatrists, language specialists and witnesses had tried to convince during a hearing in December 2021 of the validity of this diagnosis.
In its decision, the Texas Court of Appeal agrees with them. The judges considered that the applicant had succeeded in proving that he satisfied “the legal and clinical criteria for a diagnosis of an intellectual developmental disorder and is therefore ineligible for the death penalty”.
Now 50 years old, Joseph Jean was born on the US Virgin Islands to two French parents. His mother, who lives near Houston, arrived in Texas with five of her seven sons in 1985 to join her husband who had found a position as a welder in a refinery, she explained in October 2022.