Twenty-one months after the crash, the trial of French comedian Pierre Palmade opened Wednesday in Melun, in the Paris region, for the serious road accident he caused while under the influence of drugs, leading to the highly publicized fall of this popular figure mired in his drug addiction.
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Entering the court through a back door to escape the swarm of cameras, Pierre Palmade is sitting on the dock between his lawyers, pale complexion, sunken face, staring into space, wearing a black jacket over a white shirt .
Called to the stand at the opening of the criminal hearing, he stated his identity in a small voice.
As a repeat offender due to a conviction in 2019 for drug use, he faces a sentence of fourteen years’ imprisonment and a fine of 200,000 euros.
At the end of the day on February 10, 2023, this man of theater and television took the wheel to go shopping, after several days of partying and unbridled drug consumption. On a road in the south of the Seine-et-Marne department, his car collided with a vehicle coming in front.
In addition to the actor, then aged 54, the accident left three seriously injured from the same family: a 38-year-old man, his six-year-old son and his 27-year-old sister-in-law, who lost the baby she had after the impact. ‘she was waiting.
One road injury accident among the 52,000 recorded in mainland France that year. But due to the notoriety of the accused, this collision will explode into a media storm of rare intensity.
Throughout the cascade of revelations about the lifestyle and addictions of this drifting artist, the general public discovers with astonishment the dark side of a popular comedian, although a little out of fashion, who has been staging since 30 years of his struggle against his existential terrors.
After a long year of judicial investigation, the investigating judge sent Pierre Palmade back to the Melun criminal court at the end of May for involuntary injuries, aggravated by taking drugs.
She did not retain the qualification of involuntary homicide, which the prosecution had requested for the loss of the fetus, considering that this thorny question at the confluence of bioethics and law deserved a “debate before the trial court”.
Legal debates
“This choice of the investigating magistrate is, in my opinion, highly contested and questionable, it must therefore be discussed,” declared the lawyer for the three victims of the accident, Me Mourad Battikh, at the start of the hearing.
Following the accident, the baby was urgently extracted by cesarean section from his mother’s womb at six months of pregnancy, but declared dead after 32 minutes of resuscitation, without having given any sign of extra-uterine life.
However, according to consistent case law from the Court of Cassation, the highest court of the judicial order in France, a child who is not born alive does not exist as a legal person.
“In this case, everyone agrees to challenge absurd case law,” said Mr. Battikh.
At the end of the day in February 2023, Pierre Palmade had a large quantity of cocaine and 3MMC (a synthetic drug) in his blood when he got behind the wheel with two “bringue” companions, who were not prosecuted .
His heyday of the 1990s-2000s behind him: heavily in debt, the comedian is so mired in his drug addiction that he is no longer able to work.
On a departmental road in the town of Villiers-en-Bière, south-east of Paris, the Peugeot 3008 of its production company veers into the oncoming traffic lane and collides head-on with the family’s Renault Mégane Y., who is coming in the opposite direction.
The injured family members are still suffering the physical and psychological after-effects of the accident.
