Text messages and family fondue: Geneva justice will have to review a conviction for rape

Published on June 5, 2024 at 6:38 p.m. / Modified on June 5, 2024 at 6:39 p.m.

Nothing sticks anymore in the unfolding of this story of rape within a couple of students with a somewhat tumultuous relationship. This is the conclusion of the Federal Court which returns its copy to the Geneva cantonal court, with instructions to admit the request for review filed by the defense of young Georges*. The said court will have to look more seriously at the impact of certain text message exchanges discovered late as well as the recent statements of the complainant, who now explains that the attack took place on another date. According to the judgment, communicated to the parties this Tuesday, “it was clearly untenable” to hold that these new elements were not likely to undermine the findings of fact on which the appellant’s conviction is based.

In this affair, revealed by The weather, Georges, definitively sentenced to 4 and a half years in prison as well as deportation (all having been suspended pending the outcome of this review procedure), hoped that the discovery of a very old cell phone would be able to shake up his judicial destiny. Maybe he wasn’t completely wrong. At least that is what his defenders, Messrs Yaël Hayat, Guglielmo Palumbo and Gabrielle Peressin, expect: “This judgment of the Federal Court finally puts our client back on the path to recognition of his innocence, the evidence of which is serious and irrefutable. It is time for the Court of Justice to give this decision the weight it deserves by annulling the wrongly pronounced conviction.”

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