In an extremely rare decision in France, justice on Thursday annulled the life prison sentence of Dany Leprince and ordered that he be retried for a quadruple family murder in 1994, a twist in this famous criminal case.
• Also read: The Dany Leprince affair: a butcher’s cleaver killing, a convicted person and doubts
Only a dozen criminal convictions have been overturned in France since 1945.
“The Court of Revision and Re-examination judges that two of the elements likely to have been taken into account by the Assize Court are weakened by elements unknown to the court, which is likely to give rise to doubt about the guilt of Dany Leprince,” declared its president Nicolas Bonnal.
Dany Leprince, 69 years old, 18 of whom were behind bars, welcomed the decision with tears in his eyes and fell into the arms of his loved ones in the middle of the criminal chamber of the Court of Cassation, in Paris.
AFP
“The truth must come out”, “the fight continues”, he declared to the press, he who was playing his last resort, fifteen years after having suffered a first refusal of revision.
Now free, the former employee of a butchery factory has long proclaimed his innocence of the murders of his brother, his sister-in-law and two of their daughters aged 7 and 10 in their house in Thorigné-sur-Dué, neighboring his own, in the Sarthe department (central-west).
The Court of Review ordered that Dany Leprince be retried during a trial to be held in Angers, before the Maine-et-Loire Assize Court.
To support its decision, the Court first retained the testimony of Solène Leprince, the only survivor of the stabbing massacre, aged 2 years at the time. Having become an adult, this woman says she has no memory of the tragedy, while at the time of the proceedings there was evidence to suggest that she saw Dany Leprince killing her family.
“I am broken to have lost my parents and my sisters, but also angry that there are still gray areas today,” declared, moved, the survivor at the Court of Review last month, before which she came to support her uncle’s request.
The Court of Review then took into account the “alleged loss of memory” of Martine Compain, Dany Leprince’s wife at the time of the events, on the course of the fatal evening. According to subsequent assessments, these could turn out to be a “simulation”.
Aged 37 at the time of the events, Dany Leprince, who had been described as the “butcher of Sarthe”, was sentenced in December 1997 by the Sarthe Assize Court to life imprisonment with a security period of 22 years, a judgment which has now been annulled.
