the essential
A twenty-year-old man was convicted by the Ariège court on Wednesday, November 6, for raping a young woman when they were both minors at the time of the events.
Nearly three hours of deliberation and then gone. Thus concluded the first file of the last assize session of Ariège of 2024 at the Foix court. A young Ariégeois was sentenced to two years of probation, with obligations for care, work or training and compensation for damage and a ban on contact with the victim.
He was being prosecuted for rape of the latter and was therefore tried from Monday November 4 to yesterday, Wednesday November 6. At the start of the hearing, it was decided that the publicity of the proceedings would be restricted: namely that, as the accused and the victim were minors at the time of the events, the hearing would not be held in public to protect them , and that the restriction would be lifted at the time of the verdict.
The minority excuse intervenes in the decision
During the latter, delivered in public, the court and the jurors decided that the young man was indeed guilty of rape, but that he was suffering from a psychological disorder impairing his discernment at the time of the facts. They also considered it necessary to apply a criminal sanction rather than an educational measure, the young man being over twenty today, but the minority excuse also applies to the extent that he was a minor at the time. .
The sanction is therefore embodied in two years of probationary suspension, when the attorney general had requested a firm six months accompanied by three years of suspension. “It was said that you were guilty because the victim was not able to consent to the sexual act, while you were aware of the abnormality of her situation. But we held that you were a minor at the time of the facts, that you did not have much life or sexual experience, that you have an extremely painful life journey… All of this was taken into account in our reflection,” indicated the president, Madame Ratinaud.
During the civil hearing which followed, the twenty-year-old was also ordered to pay 12,000 euros in compensation to the victim, to repair the moral damage she suffered.
