The publication on April 26 of an implementing decree on the law passed after the Halimi affair creates confusion.
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Barely closed in Parliament, the battle around the question of criminal irresponsibility has rekindled on the occasion of the publication, on April 26, of a decree of implementing the law of January 24. In fact, this decree seems to take the opposite view from what the Minister of Justice, Eric-Dupond-Moretti, and the majority had engaged during the parliamentary debate in the second semester 2021.
One of the objectives of the law relating to criminal responsibility and internal security was to respond to the misunderstanding created by the Sarah Halimi affair, whose murderer was deemed criminally irresponsible. The Court of Cassation had found that the law did not make it possible to distinguish the reasons which caused the temporary abolition of its discernment. The legislator therefore created an offense allowing to judge a person, not for his crime for whom irresponsibility would be retained, but for having consumed upstream a “psychoactive substance” by being aware that it could make him lose the link with reality and commit a crime.
This offense is supposed to concern the very rare cases in which drug or excessive alcohol consumption would have caused a temporary abolition of discernment. There was no question of including the case of a patient with mental disorders who would have stopped his treatment. “We must not confuse the voluntary capture of psychotropic drugs and the omission of care”, had thus justified Mr. Dupond-Moretti before the Law Commission of the National Assembly.
“General Bronca”
So why is it specified in the Official Journal of April 26 that the provisions of the new article 706-120 of the Code of Criminal Procedure resulting from the law of January 24 apply “when the mental disorder does not result from Voluntary poisoning of the constitutive person of these new offenses, but that it follows, for example, from the latter’s judgment by medical treatment “? This sentence does not appear in the decree itself, signed by the Minister, but in the “notice” introducing it.
A real red cloth that made all psychiatrist organizations jump. “Stopping treatment, therapeutic unobservance or partial adhesion to a prescription are clinical signs of most severe mental illnesses (psychotic disorders, bipolar disorders in particular)”, recall the legal psychiatry section of the association French of biological psychiatry and neuropsychopharmacology, the National Company of Psychiatrists Experts at the Courts of Appeal (CNEPCA) and the National Association of Psychiatrists Experts in a joint statement published on April 28. These organizations unanimously denounce a decree which “therefore makes the patient guilty of his symptoms”.
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