A 15-year-old boy was sentenced Thursday July 16 to 18 years of criminal imprisonment for the murder of a supervisor at his college last year in Haute-Marne, a case which caused uproar throughout the country.
This prison sentence, which was applauded in the courtroom, is consistent with that requested by the public prosecutor. Due to his young age, the accused was tried behind closed doors before the Chaumont children’s court, and faced a maximum of 20 years.
Contrary to the public prosecutor’s requisitions, the court accepted the alteration of the teenager’s discernment at the time of the events, considering that he was suffering from a “delusion of persecution”, according to the president. But the court rejected the reduction in sentence of a third induced by the alteration of discernment, because of “the extreme seriousness of the facts” and because the accused showed “no empathy, nor remorse, nor regrets with regard to the facts”, underlined the president.
Underlining his “extreme psychiatric dangerousness” leading to an “extreme risk of recidivism”, the court combined his sentence of criminal imprisonment with ten years of socio-judicial monitoring, with an obligation of care.
Third grade student
On the morning of June 10, 2025, Mélanie, 31, an education assistant at the Françoise-Dolto college in Nogent, a usually peaceful Haut-Marne village of 3,500 inhabitants, was stabbed to death in front of the establishment. She was the mother of a little boy. The facts took place in front of numerous witnesses, during an unannounced check of students’ bags by gendarmes in front of the school, precisely intended to detect possible bladed weapons.
Then a third grade student in the establishment and aged 14, the teenager was overpowered on the spot by a gendarme, injuring the latter’s hand at the time of his arrest. In police custody, he told investigators that he had no “particular grievance” towards Mélanie, but that he wanted to attack a supervisor, “any one”.
Without a criminal record until then, he would have matured his project a few days before the facts, after another supervisor would have “lectured” him while he kissed his girlfriend within the college, reported at the time the Chaumont prosecutor Denis Devallois.
Taking place in the context of a series of knife attacks in schools, this murder had a very strong impact throughout the country, particularly in the political and educational spheres.
