Accused of rape in 1998 by a high school student, who withdrew her testimony in 2017, Farid El Haïry had spent eleven months and twenty-three days in pre-trial detention. Robert-Diard
Thursday, December 15, the Court of Revision of the Court of Cassation solemnly recognized the innocence of Farid El Haïry, by canceling his conviction for sexual assault and aggravated rape on minor, pronounced on December 19 in 2003 by the court D ‘Assizes of northern minors. This is the twelfth time, since the beginning of the V e Republic, that justice leads to its end this procedure to recognize the innocence of a condemned.
Fifteen years, day, have passed this morning of December 15, 1998 this morning when an investigator of the gendarmerie of Hazebrouck (North) presented himself at the home of Julie D., a 15 -year -old high school student, to collect her Testimony following a complaint for “sexual assault” and “rape” in a meeting. Four days later, the girl without hesitation was the n o 6 on the photo album presented to him by the gendarmes. “It is Farid, it was he who raped me.”
of this case, justice and not only she must learn. As Anne-Sophie Wagnon-Horiot recalled, Julie D.’s lawyer during the hearing before the Revision Court, Wednesday December 8, the recognition of this miscarriage of justice invites to “not sacrifice a word, of which The content must be confronted with the elements of a file, not to be satisfied with a single word “. But this story is not only that of a young girl who lied, locked up at 15 in the “powerful denial” of a family secret, repeated incests – and partially recognized since – on the part of a brother elder when she was between 8 and 12 years old. It is first of all that of a designated culprit who was an ideal culprit.
At 17, Farid El Haïry was out of school, dragged a bad reputation as a brawler and a small offender. His father, Moroccan, was a worker, his mother, French, school employee. One of his brothers was known to the police and justice. Julie D.’s parents headed a family business that employed around fifty employees, her two older brothers were studying. From this, also, justice and not only she must learn.
But this case also poses other questions. Farid El Haïry was sentenced by the Court of Assizes of Minors in 2003 to five years’ imprisonment, including four years and two months suspended, a sentence that covered his pre -trial detention. There are two ways to read this verdict: either judges and jurors showed an astonishing benevolence, deciding not to overwhelm a young man at the dawn of his adult life, despite the very facts serious of which they had declared him guilty. Either they doubted, and buried their disorder under a slight pain, with the hope that Farid El Haïry would not appeal, what happened, in defiance of the principle that doubt must benefit the accused.
a compensation procedure will be launched
Finally, how not to wonder about a judicial institution which, for a year, left unanswered the detailed letter addressed in 2017 by Julie D. to the public prosecutor of Douai, in which she explained that she had condemned wrongly an innocent? How to justify that he had to send a second letter, full of disarray, in 2018, for his withdrawal to be taken into account and a diligent survey?
Franck Berton, lawyer for Farid El Haïry, will now launch a compensation procedure for the eleven months and twenty-three days of abusive pre-trial detention of his client. What is the life of a boy wrongly incarcerated between 17 and 18 years old? What are his infamous registration for the national sex offender file and the obligation to point to the police station to which he was monitored for fifteen years?
Officially, only abusive detention is compensated, but there is no official scale. In September 2011, after a revision trial, the Rennes Court of Appeal set at 797,352 euros the amount of compensation to pay to Loïc Décher, an agricultural worker wrongly sentenced for “rape on minor”, who had spent seven years and three months behind bars. His mother had also been compensated for his damage, up to 50,000 euros, as well as her two brothers and sister, who had received 30,000 euros each. The girl who had accused Loïc drying, then recognized having lied, had to reimburse the compensation collected as a victim.