The State was ordered to pay 88,000 euros to the Guarantee Fund for Victims of Acts of Terrorism and Other Offenses, in reimbursement of compensation paid to the family of a man killed by fellow prisoners in prison in Marseille.
In a ruling rendered on November 25, a copy of which AFP obtained on Thursday, the Marseille Administrative Court of Appeal recalls that “the prison administration must ensure effective protection of their physical integrity for each detained person.”
“Even in the absence of fault, the State is required to repair the damage resulting from the death of a detained person caused by violence committed within a penitentiary establishment by another detained person,” underlines the judgment.
This case concerns the lynching at Baumettes prison, on December 16, 2017, of a 20-year-old prisoner by five fellow prisoners in one of the exercise yards. The young man died from his serious injuries on February 7, 2018.
The five young people who hit him were sentenced in 2020 to sentences ranging from 14 to 20 years of criminal imprisonment.
Members of the detainee’s family (his two brothers, his mother, his father and his uncle) had applied to the administrative court for the State to compensate them for “their moral damage” to the tune of 50,000 euros for each parent, 30 000 euros for each of the two brothers and 10,000 euros for the uncle.
This request was rejected on May 30, 2023 and they then appealed to the administrative court of appeal. This considered “that there is good reason to set the compensation for the loss of affection of the mother at 30,000 euros”, just as for the father, and at 14,000 euros for each of his brothers “counts given their young age. On the other hand, she ruled out the legitimacy of compensation for the uncle for whom “particularly intense emotional ties” had not been proven.
But the court stressed that the State should not pay these sums to the family because the Guarantee Fund for Victims of Acts of Terrorism and Other Offenses has already compensated them.
On the other hand, the Court ruled that the State must reimburse all of these sums, i.e. 88,000 euros, to the Guarantee Fund, plus interest since July 2023.
