Commissioner Grégoire Chassaing, the only person prosecuted for the drowning of Steve Maia Caniço in the Loire after a police intervention during the Fête de la Musique in Nantes in 2019, was acquitted on Friday by the Rennes criminal court.
The court ruled that the commissioner, who was tried for five days in June for involuntary manslaughter, had committed no fault that could have led to Steve falling into the river. The prosecution, however, had called for the 54-year-old police officer to be unequivocally convicted.
It was he “who led to a collective action, which created the situation that ultimately led to the death of Steve”, a 24-year-old after-school group leader, prosecutor Philippe Astruc had said in his indictment. However, he had simply requested “a sentence in principle”, without setting a quantum.
President Marianne Gil explained on Friday when delivering her judgment that the court had indeed considered that there was “an incontestable spatio-temporal concomitance” between the use of tear gas by the police and Steve’s fall into the Loire.
The gas cloud had caused a crowd movement among the public gathered on the quay for the Fête de la Musique, causing five people, including Steve Maia Caniço, to fall into the river. According to his relatives, the young man had a phobia of water since childhood and did not know how to swim.
Despite this “link” between the police intervention and the death by drowning, no decision taken that evening by Commissioner Chassaing is in question and “we have not found any evidence establishing that you committed an error”, the president stressed.
During the proceedings, the public prosecutor himself found mitigating circumstances for the commissioner in charge of securing the site: the police officers under his command launched about ten tear gas grenades on their own initiative in response to projectiles being thrown by “party-goers” who refused to allow the music from the sound systems to stop at the agreed time, 4:00 a.m.
Called to testify, police officers had also assured that they had acted “in self-defense” to this “rain” of stones and bottles, individually and without instructions being given to this effect. “We do not see how, in a concrete manner, you could have prevented them” or even how such an order “could have been legally justified”, Marianne Gil specified on Friday.
– Call from the prosecution? –
“Justice has been served. Grégoire Chassaing is an innocent man,” reacted the commissioner’s lawyer, Louis Cailliez, after the judgment. “I won’t hide from you that the feeling of deliverance, liberation, emotion, is indescribable,” he added, considering that “this decision is only the strict reflection of the factual and legal truth of this case.”
The defense attorney also had “a thought for the relatives of Steve Maia Caniço”, civil parties in the trial and who “were absolutely dignified during the debates.” For Me Cailliez, “the acquittal that has just been pronounced is absolutely not a snub for the civil parties.”
Lawyers for Steve’s relatives have expressed the hope that the prosecution will appeal this acquittal. “There are technical elements that do not seem to have been taken into account at this stage by the court,” Me Cécile de Oliveira told journalists, recalling that “the first instance decision is not final at this stage.”
Commissioner Chassaing admitted at the bar that he had “not had everything under control” on the evening of the tragedy, but “who would have been irreproachable in such conditions?”
The defense insisted that the police officer had “at no time” shown any desire to fight the DJ who had turned the music back on despite his orders, nor had he sought to stir up tensions with the “party-goers.” Elements that the court also cited to explain its judgment.
