“It’s the end of the fight.” Eighty years after the murder in 1946 of a gamekeeper in Indre, the Court of Revision refused on Thursday July 2 to annul the convictions of Raymond Mis and Gabriel Thiennot, rejecting the decades of campaign for their rehabilitation.
This decision was the only chance for the supporters of Mis and Thiennot to change the end of the story in this old post-war criminal case with the now deceased protagonists, which has become a local legend in Berry where 31 municipalities have public spaces in their names.
But the Court of Review noted “that if it is obvious that the investigators did not explore all possible avenues, the reasons why their suspicions quickly focused on this group of hunters emerge from the documents in the file”, even recently redacted from certain key documents obtained under violence by the police, declared its president Nicolas Bonnal.
For the thirteen magistrates of the Court, the additional investigations carried out during the successive requests for review “did not make it possible to dismiss the charges identified during the initial investigation” or to “confirm the rumors pointing to another culprit”. Consequently, “the elements that remain against us are sufficient to justify the conviction of the two hunters,” explained the Court of Review in a press release.
The rejection of the request created great disappointment in the room among those in favor of the innocence of the two hunters. “Once again, justice has failed in its obligations. Today she had a unique opportunity to reverse a decision that was totally false, and once again justice has failed,” reacted angrily Thierry Thiennot, son of Gabriel, at the end of the hearing. “For us, it’s the end of the fight,” he noted with bitterness.
It took seven requests since 1952, and a tailor-made amendment in a 2021 law, for this file to reach the Court of Revision and Re-examination, the only one capable of overturning the conviction of the two men to fifteen years of forced labor in 1950.
“Popular belief”
Without ruling directly on the guilt of Mis and Thiennot, the Court had to say whether the file in its current state was likely to create doubt about it.
Gabriel Thiennot and Raymond Mis having died in 2003 and 2009, holding a new trial on the merits of the case would have been impossible. In the event of their conviction being overturned, the two defendants would therefore have remained presumed innocent and would thus have been rehabilitated.
At the hearing on June 11 in a packed criminal chamber, Advocate General Pascal Bougy opposed such a revision. Calling on the Court to resist “the pressure of public opinion” and “popular belief”, he considered that there was no new element compared to those available to the Assize Court when sentencing them.
The rejection of the request is “obviously disappointing, because the procedure followed several decades ago against them was tainted by fundamental defects”, reacted in a press release the lawyers of the heirs of Mis and Thiennot, Mes Jean-Pierre Mignard, Pierre-Emmanuel Blard and Imrane Ghermi.
But the cancellation, almost eighty years later, of reports extorted by violence marks, according to them, “already a great moral victory” which will set “jurisprudence” to say “that no violence is admissible in order to make someone prosecuted confess and make them guilty.”
On December 31, 1946, two days after his disappearance, the body of game warden Louis Boistard was found riddled with lead in Saint-Michel-en-Brenne (Indre), half submerged in a pond.
The investigation quickly turned towards a conflict with a group of hunters who were allegedly controlled by Louis Boistard on the day of the incident. After an altercation, Raymond Mis and Gabriel Thiennot allegedly fired guns.
Arrested, the two suspects confessed to the police and the investigating judge. But they came back on it a few days later and subsequently proclaimed their innocence. In 1950, after two trials annulled by the Court of Cassation, the Assize Court of Gironde sentenced them to fifteen years of forced labor.
