“There would no longer be a single juror to apply the death penalty today,” says Luc Briand

In October 1975, Jérôme Carrein killed Cathy Petit, 10, in Palluel, a village in Pas-de-Calais, near Douai. With Revenge of the Guillotine, Luc Briand, magistrate at the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal, returns to this forgotten case that he compares with another, much more publicized: the crime of
Patrick henry which focused, at the same time, the debate on the death penalty. 20 minutes returns to this book on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty.

What is the starting point of this book?

I have always wondered why a State, which deploys so many means to help unborn children, can show the same determination to execute people condemned to death. I also try to explain why our country kept the death penalty for so long, when our neighbors had abolished it.

Why choose the Carrein affair that we have forgotten?

The context of this case is fascinating. The crime of Jerome Carrein takes place in 1975, a few months before Patrick Henry murdered Philippe Bertrand, a 7-year-old child. During his trial in 1977, Patrick Henry escaped the guillotine. Fifteen days later, Jérôme Carrein will be sentenced to death. It is these parallel destinies that interested me in discussing the issue of the death penalty. Especially since I was born in June 1977, twelve days before the date of the execution of Carrein, who is the last person of French nationality to have been guillotined. It was in Douai.

The death penalty is the central subject of your book …

I am against the death penalty. I wanted to understand how, forty years ago, two assize courts were able to send a man to the guillotine after a deliberation of barely an hour. This trial seems to me to be indicative of the end of this sentence. The closer this end approaches, the more its supporters, in reaction, try to obtain death sentences.

To read you, Carrein would have been “victim” of leniency vis-à-vis Patrick Henry?

Robert Badinter believes that if Patrick Henry had been condemned to death and executed, Jérôme Carrein would perhaps have escaped the guillotine through a sort of weariness on the part of the president, at the thought of these severed heads, one after the other, in less than a year.

What is your feeling ?

Between the Carrein affair and the Henry affair, legally, we are on the same scale: a crime against a child. But morally, they are different: in Patrick Henry, we find a cold-blooded assassination guided by the greed and in Carrein, an impulse under the influence of alcohol.

In the last chapter, you thoroughly describe the execution. Is it a plea against the death penalty?

Precisely no. I didn’t want to build it like that. I wanted to tell how a performance goes through the eyes of several protagonists so that everyone can form their own opinion.

How long did it take you to write this research-intensive book?

I started in 2012, working every year, a few days or a few weeks. I consulted Carrein’s file in the departmental archives in Lille. I went to Alsace to meet the judge in charge of the case, but also to Paris to collect the testimony of the executioner’s son. He had assisted his father during the execution. I also went to Arleux, near Douai, where the family of the murdered girl lived. I interviewed about 15 people in all.

You regret not having been able to question the then president, Valéry Giscard D’Estaing?

Yes of course. I would have liked him to explain to me why he chose not to grant the presidential pardon. But I respect his choice. To pardon someone is so much a matter of intimacy and personal conscience.

How did you manage to convince a publisher for a first book?

I was confident in my subject. I first wrote and then I sent the manuscript by post to an editor who forwarded it to the Plein Jour editions that I did not know. The editor contacted me to tell me that he was interested.

Do you think that the majority of French people are hostile to the death penalty today?

I think there would no longer be a juror to apply the death penalty. There is a distortion between the opinions that are given on social networks and the work that I see in the juries. The concentration and involvement of jurors are impressive in assize trials. You have to decide on a concrete case with all the data in hand. This is different from a general opinion given on the Internet.

What experience do you draw from the study of the Carrein file?

This work has helped me put the issues forty years apart into perspective. We see that the defense was less protected at the time, the lawyers less present. There was less recourse. We feel the change of epoch.

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