Last words to the accused before the verdict

The accused have their say: after three and a half months of hearings, the 51 men tried in the Mazan rape trial have one last opportunity to speak, Monday morning. Then the Vaucluse criminal court will retire to deliberate, for a highly anticipated verdict, a priori Thursday.

From 9 a.m., these men aged 27 to 74 will each have the opportunity to speak, one last time, to explain the sexual violence inflicted on Gisèle Pelicot, over ten years, at her marital home in Mazan ( Vaucluse), from 2011 to 2020.

The first to speak, if he wishes, will be Dominique Pelicot, 72 years old, her now ex-husband, the one who drugged her with anxiolytics to rape her and deliver her to dozens of strangers he recruited on the internet .

Then the accused will follow one another in the order in which their cases had been studied by the court, with first Jean-Pierre M., 63 years old, the only one not to be prosecuted for facts about Gisèle Pelicot but for having reproduced the same process of chemical submission, in the company of Dominique Pelicot, on his own wife.

These speeches, at the bar of the Avignon court for the 32 accused appearing free or from their box for the 18 accused detained (Editor’s note: the 51st, on the run, is being tried in absentia), will be made under strictly defined conditions. .

“This moment must allow each accused to possibly add a word. It is not a question of repeating what may have been argued by the lawyers in recent days. It is obvious that what has already been said would be repetitive and in this case I could cut off the intervention,” warned the president of the court, Roger Arata, on Thursday.

In its indictment, on November 25, 26 and 27, the prosecution requested the maximum possible sentence, i.e. 20 years of criminal imprisonment, against Dominique Pelicot, the “conductor” of this decade of rapes against his wife. Then the requisitions were spread from 10 to 18 years of imprisonment against the 49 accused prosecuted for aggravated rape, four years of prison being requested against the last one, only prosecuted for “touching” Gisèle Pelicot.

Will the court follow these requisitions, more severe than the general average of convictions for rape in France, which was 11.1 years in 2022, according to the Ministry of Justice?

Or, conversely, will she dare to follow the thirty requests for acquittal made by defense lawyers, according to whom their clients were “manipulated” by the “monster”, the “wolf” or even “ the ogre” Dominique Pelicot, and “did not intend” to rape his ex-wife?

By its decision, the court will send “a message of hope to the victims of sexual violence”, Laure Chabaud, one of the two representatives of the public prosecutor at this trial which has also become emblematic of questions of submission, had hoped during the indictment. chemical and consent. This last week will close an extraordinary procedure, which began on September 2 in Avignon, with powerful national and international repercussions.

Once the last words of the accused have been expressed, the court will retire to deliberate, a process “scheduled to last three days”, Roger Arata said on Friday.

The five professional magistrates of the criminal court will then give their verdict, “in principle on Thursday at 9:30 a.m.”, added the magistrate: but, “if we ever needed additional time, we could postpone the pronouncement of the deliberation until Thursday afternoon or Friday morning.

Victim or witness to sexual assault?