The two police officers, who seriously injured a motorist and his passenger after refusing to comply, in August 2021, in Stains (Seine-Saint-Denis), were sentenced this Thursday by the Bobigny criminal court to four years suspended prison sentence.
Aged 30 and 33, they are also permanently banned from serving in the national police and banned from carrying weapons for five years. “This is a decision that we do not understand and which we are appealing immediately,” their lawyer, Me Laurent-Franck Liénard, told AFP.
“This is a very important decision, to my knowledge the first in this configuration,” reacted to the Parisian Me Vincent Brengarth, the lawyer for Nordine, the driver of the car. The totally disproportionate nature of the violence excluded any self-defense. This is a significant decision for Nordine but also for all victims of comparable events. It restores the reality of the facts, at the same time as it finally affirms a sign of the independence of justice, when faulty officials are implicated. »
Eight balls in 6.25 seconds
During the trial at the beginning of October, the prosecutor requested a year in prison under electronic surveillance against these two police officers from the local anti-crime brigade (BAC), a sentence accompanied by a ban on possessing a weapon for five years.
The court considered that the police officers, who fired eight bullets in six seconds, “could not rely on article 435-1 of the internal security code”, which governs the use of weapons by the police. , because they were “not in uniform”, nor equipped with “visible badges and armbands (…)” during this nocturnal intervention.
“Moreover, there is no self-defense when you used your weapons,” added the president of the 14th criminal chamber of the Bobigny court, highlighting a “disproportion between the shots which seriously injured victims and driver behavior.”
More than 100 days of sick leave
Nordine shed a few tears while listening to the deliberations. Hit by five bullets in the abdomen, arms, groin, femoral artery and thorax, he was prescribed 127 days of total incapacity for work (ITT). He has since been disabled and lost 10 cm in one of his arms. Bullet fragments remain in his body. Merryl, the passenger, was shot through, had her spleen removed and had 100 days of ITT.
The Stains BAC crew, in civilian clothes and in an unmarked car, carried out this check on the night of August 15 to 16, 2021. An amateur video widely distributed on social networks captured part of the intervention, which follows a first exchange between the officials and the driver, who was drunk at the time.
VideoRefusal to comply with Stains: hit seven times by police shots, Nordine receives 2 years in prison
We see one of the police officers trying to enter the passenger compartment of the car. The driver engages reverse. The two brigadiers fired several times, aiming at the motorist. This is the first time they used their weapon. During their trial at the beginning of October, they insisted that they considered that their lives were in danger.
More than a hundred activists gathered in the courtroom on October 4 to follow this symbolic trial, one of the first relating to the use of firearms after the Cazeneuve law of 2017.
