Wednesday November 20, 2024, Pierre Palmade was sentenced to five years in prison, two of which were closed. Found guilty of involuntary injuries following the accident he caused, the comedian was not tried for intentional homicide. Remember, during this tragic accident, a 6-month pregnant woman lost her child. But justice does not retain the qualification of homicide, considering that the child was not stillborn.
For the podcast What is the law?journalist Laurent Neumann received two leading specialists to fully understand this fundamental question of law. The investigating judge “considering that the texts aim at the death of others and for it to be considered that it is about others there must be a person who was born alive and that a fetus is not in the eyes of the law, others. This is the reason why we could not consider, here, that there was homicide.” indicates Jean-Baptiste Perrier, Dean of the University of Aix-Marseille.
The central question of the deceased fetus
To which, the one who officiates on BFMTV relaunches: “Sorry to go into details which will seem a little morbid to you but it turns out that I had the opportunity to read the file and it turns out that this child was born”, describes Laurent Neumann.
“For around thirty minutes, we tried to resuscitate him but he gave no sign of life so we consider that he was stillborn, or more precisely, died in-utero”. A fundamental question in the trial of Pierre Palmade.
Pierre Palmade tried for injuries and not homicide
To which the expert will try to explain the difference between two cases: “We will distinguish depending on whether the child has breathed or not. It is a criterion which is very concrete and tragic because if the child dies in-utero, he was never born alive and therefore he has never attained the status of person, in the sense of the law and is therefore not never became someone else”he explains.
This is what happened during the accident caused by Pierre Palmade. “On the other hand, if he suffers an in-utero accident, he is born, he does not breathe even for a single moment and he dies, he will have in this short moment accessed this status of person (…) and we can retain the qualification of involuntary homicide”.
