The young man was charged and remanded in custody. His lawyer wonders about his degree of criminal responsibility.
LL with AFP
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Dtwo days after the murder of teacher Agnès Lassalle at Saint-Thomas-d’Acquin high school in Saint-Jean-de-Luz, the student who stabbed his Spanish teacher was “indicted for murder” on Friday and remanded in custody, according to Thierry Sagardoytho, his lawyer.
He will be imprisoned “in a place whose destination must be kept confidential”, he added after the presentation to the magistrates of the 16-year-old teenager. “It’s an establishment that will take into account both its youth and the care it needs. »
“We are talking about a young person unknown to the judicial and educational radars, who suddenly took action, at the cost of personal motivations that I refrain from putting in the public square but which need to be probed, appreciated, tested by psychiatrists”, in order to determine whether his discernment was “complete”, or “on the contrary abolished, or possibly altered”.
What degree of criminal liability?
“It will be necessary to go well beyond the summary examination”, added the lawyer who said he was “frightened to read the report” made to the press of the first psychiatric examination of which the teenager was the subject. in custody. Thursday, the public prosecutor in Bayonne, Jérôme Bourrier, had declared that this first examination had revealed “a form of reactive anxiety which could disturb his discernment” and “elements of depression evolving for a year”, but “no mental illness schizophrenia, manic state, melancholy or mental retardation, or acute psychiatric decompensation”.
“The adolescent appears accessible to criminal liability subject to the expertise which will have to be ordered and a possible alteration of his discernment”, added the prosecutor. But his lawyer wonders about his degree of criminal responsibility. For him, this first expertise “completely ignores the suicide attempt” of the teenager in October 2022, mentioned by the prosecutor, “and the medical prescriptions whose he was the object”. This suicide attempt “considerably raises questions in view of what he is accused of today”, he continued. “Was the care appropriate? Have warning signs been detected? Obviously, no. “According to the lawyer, “when he tells the facts, in my opinion, it is not he who acts. When one speaks in the third person of oneself, I wonder about a possible dissociation of personality. »READ ALSO Teacher killed in Saint-Jean-de-Luz: “We have identified the students in a situation of overwhelmed stress”
“It is not an expertise worthy of the name, it is an opinion”, added the lawyer for whom “the truths of today are very likely not to be those of tomorrow”. “I do not want to paint the portrait of a young man of whom I do not have the competence to say what he is suffering from […] but many of those who know him guess that there is a problem […] a kind of drowning, of intimate suffering which could have led to irreparable damage,” he continued.
The teenager “is obviously devastated by the act he has committed and which he is accused of”, also underlined the lawyer, painting the portrait of a “brilliant boy in scientific disciplines, visibly less at ease in the Spanish language “. According to him, the parents of the young man are “stunned” and “crushed”.
Friday morning, at 8 a.m., the students of the Saint-Thomas-d’Aquin secondary school, a private Catholic establishment renowned for its calm and its academic results, again flocked at the time of the opening of the gate, under the eyes of three policemen posted at the entrance.