Justice
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Ranging from one year in prison, for “sexual offenses”, to twenty years of criminal imprisonment against Dominique Pelicot for acts of “aggravated rape”, the sentences handed down this Thursday, December 19 by the Vaucluse criminal court are mainly below those requested by the advocates general.
Some defendants cried silently. Most bowed their heads. In his glass box, Dominique Pelicot wiped his eyes. At the end of three and a half months of hearing, the verdict of the Mazan rape trial, Thursday, was first welcomed in the anxious calm of the Voltaire room of the Avignon courthouse, reserved for the accused, the parties civilians, lawyers, and a handful of journalists and press cartoonists. The president, Roger Arata, first announced to the 50 accused present – the 51st, absent, is being tried in absentia – that they had been found guilty. Then, patiently, surrounded by the four professional magistrates forming with him the criminal court of Vaucluse, he announced the sentences, one by one. Dominique Pelicot, found guilty of drugging his ex-wife to rape her and having her raped by dozens of men and of filming these scenes for a decade. He was also found guilty of recording and possessing images taken without their knowledge of his wife, daughter and daughters-in-law. The court sentenced him to 20 years of criminal imprisonment, with a two-thirds security period. At the end of his sentence, his situation will be subject to review with a view to possible security detention.
Taste of unfinished
On the other side of the spectrum,
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