Maybe they shouldn’t have appealed. Two defendants in Mila’s cyberbullying trial after her controversial Islam video were sentenced to heavier sentences by the Paris Court of Appeal on Tuesday. The youngest of them, aged 20, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment accompanied by a probationary suspension of two years, including in particular the obligation to compensate the civil parties and to complete a citizenship course. .
The court found him guilty of aggravated harassment and death threats, an accumulation of qualifications which had not been retained at first instance. He was prosecuted for having written to Mila in the fall of 2020 “Tell me where you live where I will make you a Samuel Paty (sic)”, named after the professor beheaded for showing his students caricatures of Muhammad. The other Internet user, 31, was sentenced to one year’s imprisonment with a probationary suspension for two years, with the same obligations as his co-defendant.
Heavier sentences than at first instance: they were then respectively sentenced to six and four months of suspended imprisonment. The Court of Appeal also ordered them to pay 10,000 euros jointly and severally to Mila in compensation for her non-pecuniary damage.
” No regrets “
Three years ago, the young girl, then a minor, had been the target of a first series of hundreds of hate messages on social networks, forcing her to leave her school and live under police protection.
“What I felt at the hearing was that these two defendants had understood nothing of the seriousness of what they were accused of and had no regrets. Obviously the court had the same feeling since it quadrupled and tripled their sentences, “said Mila’s lawyer, Me Richard Malka, to AFP. “It is a judgment which will, I hope, help raise awareness that threatening to kill is a serious offence,” he added.