The victims of the prolific French pedophile Joel Le Scouarnec expressed their dismay that the sentence of 20 years in prison of the former surgeon does not include preventive detention – which means that he could be released from prison in the early 2030s.
The 74 -year -old was found guilty on Tuesday to have sexually abused hundreds of people, most of whom were minor patients in his decades.
During the trial, he admitted to having committed 111 rapes and 188 sexual assaults, and was sentenced to a maximum of 20 years in prison.
Prosecutors – who nicknamed the Scouarnec “a devil in a white layer” – had asked the court to make the disposition extremely rare to hold it in a treatment and supervision center even after their release, called pre -trial detention.
But the judge rejected this request, arguing that the age of Scouarnec and his “desire to make amends” had been taken into account.
The Scouarnec will have to serve two thirds of his sentence before being eligible for parole.
But because he has already served seven years due to a previous conviction for rape and sexual assault of four children, he can be eligible for parole by 2032.
His lawyer, Maxime Tessier, stressed that saying that Scouarnec could be released was then “inaccurate”, because parole is not a release.
But his victims – many of whom attended the trial of three months in Vannes, in the north of France – deplore the penalty.
“For a flight, you risk 30 years. But the punishment for hundreds of rapes of children is lighter?” A victim told the world.
The president of a children’s defense group, Solène Podevin Favre, said that she could have expected the “verdict” is less indulgent “and includes post-phrase preventive detention.
“It’s maximum sentence, certainly,” she said. “But that is the least we could have hoped for. However, in six years, he could potentially be released. It is amazing.”
Marie Grimaud, one of the lawyers representing the victims, told journalists that even if she “understood” intellectually “the verdict,” symbolically “, she could not.
Another lawyer, Francesca Satta, said that she thought that 20 years was too short given the number of victims in the case.
“It is time for the law to change so that we can have more appropriate sentences,” she said.
But in his judgment, read in court, judge Aude Burési declared that, although the court has “perfectly heard the requests of the complainants according to which the Scouarnec should never be released from prison, it would be demagogic and whimsical to let them believe that it would be possible”.
“In fact,” she added, “the rule of law does not allow this to happen.”
One of the victims of Scouarnec, Amélie Lévêque, said that the verdict had “shocked” it and that it would have liked the pre -trial detention to be imposed. “How many victims would it take? Thousand?”
It argued that French law should change and allow more severe sentences to take into account the series nature of crimes.
Similar complaints were raised in the aftermath of the Pelicot trial last December, in which Dominique Pelicot was found guilty of drugs and rape of his wife, Gisèle, and recruited dozens of men to mistreat her for almost a decade.
Pelicot was also sentenced to 20 years – the maximum sentence for rape in French law – with the obligation to serve a minimum of two thirds in prison.
His case, however, will have to be re -examined at the end of the prison sentence before the question of preventive detention could be explored.
In France, sentences are not consecutively purged. Prosecutor Stéphane Kellenberger noted last week that the Scouarnec had been tried in the United States – where people are serving a prison sentence after another – he may have experienced more than 4,000 years.
But Cécile de Oliveira, one of the victims’ lawyers, praised the penalty, which, according to her, had been “finely adapted” to the “psychiatric condition” of Scouarnec.
It agreed with the court’s decision not to impose preventive detention on the former surgeon, adding: “There must remain an entirely exceptional punishment”.
After reading the verdict, the victims, journalists and lawyers got involved outside the Vannes courthouse. Many civilian parties and their relatives, angry by the verdict, brought their frustration to the media.
“All I ask is that this man can no longer offend,” said the mother of a victim to French media.
“If this type of behavior should lead to perpetuity, too bad.”
