The Hérault criminal court declared Jack S., 74, guilty of rape by surprise and sentenced him, Friday, October 29, to eight years of imprisonment. In the morning, the Advocate General, Robert Bartoletti, had requested twelve years of criminal imprisonment.
The five professional magistrates accepted his guilt for the two civil parties who attended the hearing, Oriana S. and Marie-Hélène L., as well as for a third woman, Nathalie S., who had formed at the beginning of the case but which was neither present nor represented. The president had read her testimony, in which she indicated to have lived the same scenario as the other women – contact via a dating site, exchanges of messages, erotic meeting at the home of the accused, wearing a mask on the eyes for the partner – but made it clear that she only noticed the deception when she had returned to it a second time.
The guilty verdict was hardly in doubt given the tone of the debates since Monday, October 25. Against the advice of his lawyer, Mr.e Laurent Poumarede, Jack S. had accepted the proposal which had been made to him to appear before a criminal court – competent to judge in the first instance crimes punishable by twenty years of imprisonment – and not before an assize court. He then hoped, he said, that professional judges would be “Less sensitive to morality” as citizen jurors. The five magistrates of the court of Hérault especially appeared, from the opening of the debates, very sensitive to the opinion of their colleagues of the Court of Cassation and determined not to upset them.
They have indeed applied to the letter the case law established by the judgment of January 23, 2019, which quashed the dismissal order issued in the Jack S. case by the Aix-en-Provence Court of Appeal. (Bouches-du-Rhône). This judgment considers that “The use of a stratagem intended to conceal the identity and the physical characteristics of its author to surprise the consent of a person and to obtain from him an act of sexual penetration” constitutes well ” the surprise ” which falls within the constituent elements of rape within the meaning of article 222-23 of the Penal Code.
Very partial pursuits
The principle posed by this judgment, however, poses a question to which the trial of Jack S. has not answered. If the accused, then in his sixties, was guilty of “surprise rape” using a ploy – his registration on dating sites under the false identity of Anthony Laroche and the false photo of a 38-year-old model – to convince women to accept a masked sexual encounter at his home, then the logic would have been to prosecute him for all of those who have lived the same story and not for the only complainants who have made up of civil parties.
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