“Justice has been done, Amandine’s memory remains very present, I am extremely tired, empty. These are really very difficult times.“, declared Frédéric Flores, Amandine’s father, at the end of the trial.
After five days of trial and two and a half hours of deliberation, the three professional magistrates and the six popular jurors drawn by lot (five women and one man) also sentenced his ex-companion, Jean-Michel Cros, to 20 years in prison. criminal imprisonment, for having deprived his daughter-in-law of care until her death.
For Sandrine Pissarra, 54, found guilty of violence and acts of torture and barbarity, the verdict is in accordance with the indictment of the attorney general, Jean-Marie Beney, who had estimated that for this mother of eight children, “domestic tyrant, interior dictator, Amandine’s executioner“, there were no other possible sentences. The representative of the public prosecutor, however, had requested a slightly lower sentence – 18 years of imprisonment – against Jean-Michel Cros, 49 years old, “cowardly collaborator” of the “Pissara system”.
On August 6, 2020, the day of her death from cardiac arrest and septicemia, at the family home in Montblanc, near Béziers (south-west), the schoolgirl, locked up for weeks in a windowless storage room and deprived of food, weighed only 28 kg for 1.55 m. “I want to apologize to my children, that’s all“, declared Ms. Pissarra at the beginning of the afternoon, invited to speak one last time. “I have nothing to add“, Mr. Cros was content to respond.
“Torture blanche”
“For five days, you have penetrated into the horror, the unthinkable, the unspeakable… (…) You have penetrated into the Pissarra system, into the family dictatorship, an unimaginable world, put in place for more than 15 years. You have discovered that, since she was very young, Amandine has been the victim of punches, kicks, brooms, hair pulling, repeated shouting, insults, shoving.“, stated the Advocate General in his indictment. “Then, as in any dictatorial system, it is appropriate to destroy the personality of the victim, to reduce them to what we want. There is the violence, the lines to be copied, the endless sermons“.
-There is also a collective responsibility
“Then we move on to white torture: solitary confinement, which aims to reduce an individual’s spatial and temporal perception. White torture, combined with a little physical torture, kneeling on the roller, and even worse, forced nudity on a 13 year old girl“, detailed the magistrate. “The problem is Amandine’s death, it was not planned. But as it is out of the question that we will find her downstairs, in her storage room, we take her up to the second floor, where there is the shower. As she is not yet dead, but it is imminent, we are going to feed her a little, wash her, dress her, we are going – because she has been scratching for days and days, to the point that sepsis has set in – put a kind of ointment on her to try to make people think that she had been treated after all“.
“A fair, reasonable sentence”
“And then, the nail professional (Ms. Pissarra, Editor’s note) will think of something that has left an impression on everyone, we will do her nails“, Mr. Beney further explained. The system, “we could have weakened him, made him fall, before he took full power“, pleaded one of Sandrine Pissarra’s lawyers, Me Louis Dolez, in reference to the adults (ex-spouses, friends, neighbors, doctors, social workers, teachers or magistrates) who crossed Amandine’s path without taking the extent of his suffering nor act effectively to put an end to it.
If there is a “individual responsibility” incontestable, “there is still also a collective responsibility“, had also underlined Me Jean-Marc Darrigade, his other lawyer, by requesting a “fair, reasonable sentence“, which would have allowed him to “return among men“without being”an old lady“.
“Once released from the subjection of Ms. Pissarra, is Jean-Michel Cros a dangerous man? The answer is no. So hold out your hand“, had pleaded for his part Mr. Grégoire Mercier, for the ex-companion of Ms. Pissarra. Arguments that the court therefore did not follow.
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