In May 2019, Philippe B., a veterinarian in the Angers region, helped Pascal G., a relative suffering from Charcot disease, to commit suicide. The latter, who wanted to be able to kill himself before being too damaged by this incurable neurodegenerative pathology, had asked her to provide him with medication to put an end to it.
After initially refusing, the veterinarian wrote false prescriptions for an imaginary dog with which he himself obtained medication from a pharmacy which he gave to Pascal G. But the suicide attempt failed, and the patient had therefore requested a product ” more efficient “. The veterinarian then gave him a bottle of pentobarbital. Two days later, Pascal G. was found dead at his home. He had left this handwritten note: “Especially let me go this time!” »
Since assisted suicide does not appear in the penal code, it is for “forgery” and “use of forgery” – the prescriptions, therefore – that the courts found a way to prosecute the veterinarian. He, supported by the family of the deceased, has always taken responsibility for his actions. Without presenting himself as a supporter of active assistance in dying, simply as a man faced with a dilemma: let a loved one suffer, or help them by violating the law.
A release would be “carrying of excesses”
At first instance, in May 2022, Philippe B. was acquitted by the Angers court, which found that his action was justified by “the state of necessity”, and that he was therefore not criminally responsible. This legal concept – article 122-7 of the penal code –, invoked by the defense, is defined as “the situation of a person required, to avoid the occurrence of a danger, to commit an offense”as summarized by the Angers Court of Appeal in the judgment it has just handed down.
At the end of the first trial, the court considered that the decline and the inevitable suffering that Pascal G. would face before his death justified the veterinarian committing an offense. The prosecution appealed and the court of appeal, which retried Philippe B. in June, did not have the same vision of things and declared him guilty, while exempting him from punishment. The attorney general had requested a four-month suspended sentence, considering that an acquittal would be “carrier of drifts” : “To say that the act is justified is to admit that tomorrow, relatives or professionals will help a person to die outside of any framework. »
In its judgment, the court of appeal admits that “the suffering to which Pascal G. was already exposed, and also those inevitable to come, clearly constituted a danger for the latter”. But she affirms that the second condition for the state of necessity to be retained, namely the fact that“no other means was conceivable to avoid the realization of the danger”was not fulfilled.
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