life imprisonment for Amandine's mother, twenty years for the stepfather

The verdict was rendered after approximately three hours of deliberation by the Hérault Assize Courthas Montpellierthis Friday, January 24, 2025 afternoon: Sandrine Pissara, 54 years old, the mother of Amandine who died of starvation at the age of 13 in a storage room in the family home in Montblanc, in August 2020 was sentenced to reclusion life sentence with a minimum security sentence of twenty years.

For Jean-Michel Cros, her partner, father-in-law of the schoolgirl who weighed 28kg and 1.55m tall the day she was found dead, the court and the jurors went beyond the indictment of the attorney general who had requested a sentence of 18 years: he received 20 years of criminal imprisonment. The trial opened on Monday January 20, 2025. After the civil parties, the attorney general Jean-Marie Beney compared the mistreatment and the suffering of the teenager “to those inflicted in a totalitarian regime”, describing the accused as “domestic tyrant and dictator from within”.

The attorney general was relentless. Staring at Sandrine Pissara, head bowed in the box, he said: “For five days you have entered hell, the unthinkable, the unspeakable. You have penetrated into the Pissara system, into the family dictatorship, you have penetrated into an unimaginable world”, before turning to the second accused, Amandine's father-in-law: “In any totalitarian system, there are collaborators , and I see one in the box, it’s you, Mr. Cros. If we have an ounce of humanity, we react. You did not prevent this crime.”

Jean-Marie Beney assured “that he did not believe in the defense of the mother who explained that she reproduced the violence, of which she said she was a victim during the trial”. Never during the investigation, nor during the investigation, Sandrine Pissara had reported violence from her mother when she was very young. The civil party's lawyers also strongly doubted these statements and insisted at length on the martyrdom, the slow descent into hell until a horrible death of Amandine.

“How can we defend it? But it is not indefensible and it is an honor to defend it. To defend is not to endorse. We must not be contaminated by the dictatorship of emotion, I defend a woman who has freed her words. Who confessed to the facts. How can we explain this woman’s trajectory? there are definitely things. This maternal violence does not fall from the sky,” pleaded in defense Me Louis Dolez, one of the two lawyers for the accused, who have ten days to appeal the verdict.

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