The investigating committee decided on Thursday October 5 to refer the Raymond Mis and Gabriel Thiennot case to the Court of Review, 73 years after the conviction of these two men for the murder of a game warden in 1946, the lawyers announced families of the two men, who died in 2009 and 2003 respectively.
“The commission gave us satisfaction on all of our requests and therefore referred the matter to the Court of Revision, meaning that the case will be retried,” said one of the families’ lawyers, Me Jean. -Pierre Mignard. ” It’s good ! “, Thierry Thiennot, one of Gabriel’s sons, exclaimed in tears, adding: “We are only one step away from victory.”
Raymond Mis and Gabriel Thiennot were sentenced to fifteen years of forced labor for the murder of gamekeeper Louis Boistard, found dead in December 1946 in a pond in Saint-Michel-en-Brennes (Indre). Incarcerated in Châteauroux prison in January 1947, pardoned mid-sentence in 1954 by President René Coty, they always proclaimed their innocence, and claimed that their signed confessions had been extracted under torture.
In this case, several requests were made in 1980, 1988, 1993, 1996, 2005 and 2015. They were all rejected. In September 2021, the Senate agreed to a government amendment which opened the way for a new review of this matter. As part of the bill on confidence in the judicial institution, the text provided for “to include the mention of torture in the procedure for reviewing criminal convictions”, thus expanding the possibilities of referral to the Court of Review.
Only “old procedures, which took place under the criminal investigation code, before police custody was, in 1960, established, regulated and supervised by the criminal procedure code”, are only targeted, according to the text of the ‘amendment.
The Court of Review is made up of 18 magistrates from all chambers of the Court of Cassation (criminal, civil, commercial and social), when the previous one only had members from the criminal chamber.
