A 33-year-old woman was sentenced Wednesday in Saint-Etienne to 20 years of imprisonment for having strangled her fellow inmate in La Talaudière prison (Loire) in February 2020, we learned from the accused’s lawyers and civil parties.
After three days of hearing, the Loire Assize Court attached the conviction for murder to a ten-year security period and eight years of socio-judicial monitoring. Evoking “criminological danger”, Attorney General André Merle had requested 25 years of criminal imprisonment.
Psychic troubles
On February 24, 2020, following an argument, the thirty-year-old, a small, frail woman measuring 1.52 meters, hit her fellow inmate with a frying pan before cutting her neck with a knife. razor blade prepared a few hours before.
She then cut a piece of sheet to strangle him. If the psychiatric expertise showed that the accused was suffering at the time of the events from a psychological or neuropsychological disorder having impaired her discernment or control of her actions, the jurors however ruled out the abolition of discernment linked to a “auditory hallucination” pleaded by the defense.
The prosecution criticized the woman for the many variations to explain her action: the wish to remain alone in the cell, the desire to shorten the suffering of the victim who, according to her, was sad and suffering and finally the voices which would have led to taking action.
At the time of the crime, the accused had been serving a five-year prison sentence since March 2019 for damaging property by dangerous means. In particular, she set fire to vehicles in a parking lot in the basement of the Roanne courthouse (Loire).
The victim’s twin sister, sentenced in 2019 to 20 years of criminal imprisonment for parricide, was heard as a civil party. This is the first assassination committed in the women’s section of the Saint-Etienne region penitentiary center since its opening in 1968.
This article is originally published on onvoitout.fr
