The Court of Cassation on Wednesday rejected the appeal of Jean-Marc Reiser who challenged his conviction on appeal to life imprisonment for the assassination of Strasbourg student Sophie Le Tan, according to a ruling consulted by AFP.
In his appeal, Jean-Marc Reiser, 63, contested a point in the judgment of the Colmar Assize Court of Appeal which had confirmed in June 2023 the sentence handed down at first instance, namely life imprisonment. , with a security period of 22 years.
This judgment mentioned in particular that the court had decided on this sentence “by a majority of at least eight votes” which, according to Mr. Reiser, violated “the secrecy of the deliberations” and tainted “the deliberations with absolute nullity”, indicates the judgment of the criminal chamber of the Court of Cassation.
Jean-Marc Reiser recognizes the assassination… but contests premeditation
An argument swept aside by the court, which considers in particular “the statement according to which these votes were acquired by a majority of at least eight votes did not infringe the secrecy of the deliberations”. Consequently, the court “rejects the appeal” of Jean-Marc Reiser, making his conviction final in this case.
“We are not surprised (…) but it is a relief,” reacted Gérard Welzer, one of the lawyers for Sophie Le Tan’s family. “This will not bring Sophie back but justice has been served and served well,” he added. When requested, Jean-Marc Reiser’s lawyer, Emmanuel Spano, was not immediately reachable.
If he admitted to having killed the 20-year-old student of Vietnamese origin in September 2018 “in a fit of fury”, then to having dismembered her with a hacksaw before going to bury the remains of the body in a forest , Jean-Marc Reiser, on the other hand, has always denied having premeditated his action.
Very litigious, he had already multiplied acts during the Le Tan investigation. On Monday, he also filed an appeal in cassation to contest his indictment in another case, that of the disappearance in 1987 in Strasbourg of Florence Hohmann, 23 years old.
In 2001, he was definitively acquitted of the murder of this vacuum cleaner representative whose body was never found, due to lack of evidence. But in February 2020, citing “new charges”, the Strasbourg public prosecutor’s office reopened a judicial investigation into this case, not for murder this time, but for “criminal arbitrary confinement” and “concealment of a corpse”.
In another case, Jean-Marc Reiser was convicted for the first time in 2003 for rape and sexual assault.
