After two and a half years in pre-trial detention, a 48-year-old woman who stabbed her partner to death was acquitted on Thursday. A rare decision in France, the jurors of the Assize Court of Pas-de-Calais reclassified the murder as a “fatal blow” and accepted self-defense, AFP learned from his lawyer, Maître Fleur Bridoux, confirming information of the Voice of the North.
On the night of June 20 to 21, 2021, this woman, 46 years old at the time, had suffered a “single stab to the heart” of her companion, after he had thrown himself at her and “started to ‘strangle’. Both were alcoholic, “she at 1.6 grams and he at more than 2 grams,” says the lawyer. According to her, her client “has a black hole, no longer remembers if it was he who leaned over and impaled himself on the knife, or if it was she who dealt the blow”.
Accustomed to blows and complaints without follow-up
The prosecutor had requested six years of imprisonment and seven years of socio-judicial monitoring and requested the reclassification of the murder as a fatal blow. He nevertheless ruled out self-defense, arguing that “the response was neither proportionate nor concomitant with the aggression”, reports Maître Bridoux.
Still according to the lawyer, her client was “regularly assaulted by her partner” since the start of their relationship, two years earlier. She had also “already filed a complaint twice beforehand, complaints which had been closed without further action,” argued Maître Bridoux.
According to her, “what weighed in the decision on self-defense was that this gentleman’s former companions came to tell of the ordeal he had put them through”: violence, social isolation.
His client had already been convicted in the past, jointly with a previous partner, for mutual domestic violence. “She hit him with a box cutter,” said his lawyer.