“I will not pretend to think that my requisitions will influence your decision. At the end of these debates, which were long, you heard enough elements, felt a lot of emotion. Somewhere this intimate conviction is already done for the most part.” The Advocate General of the Gironde Assize Court, Eric Legrand, addresses the jurors in the first words of his indictment to try to make them understand that the accused was fully conscious and did not no aggravating circumstances.

He looks back on the childhood of the accused “He didn’t have an easy childhood, but who had an idyllic childhood? Nobody! Yes, his life was difficult of course… and what? He’s borderline, with heavy psychopathic tendencies, the experts tell us, but Thierry Roché is not the gentleman of the “silence of the lambs” he is simply someone who has a strong intolerance to frustration.” Eric Legrand continues by making the parallel on what each of us could have become before the eye of psychological experts, “They would have said that the Advocate General is a little psycho-rigid, we would all have tendencies one way or another.”

Three bullets in the heart, one bullet in the head

So should someone have done something? The Advocate General responds: “But the waitresses at the bar in the Pyrenees, if they had to file a complaint each time a customer rambles on to them with an enormity, but they would spend their lives at the police station! Do they pay attention to it? No.”

And then Eric Legrand goes over the facts, these six bullets, this waiting in the trash room, “he couldn’t have reached more vital areas. He could have left, he had hurt her, she could have got away with it but no, he finished the job with a bullet in the head when she was completely curled up on herself. Three bullets in the heart, one bullet in the head. Three shots in vital areas, a coincidence? I don’t believe it!”

Isabelle Salmon told me “above all, don’t let me go”

Come, the object of this indictment, what penalty to consider? The Advocate General, moved, says that the victim’s sister, Isabelle Salmon came to see him and told him “above all, don’t let me go”. “She would no longer live knowing it was outside” he said. And to conclude his indictment: “For all these reasons, you cannot, you cannot, consider a sentence of less than 30 years in prison.”

Disproportionate

The defense concluded this six-day trial with its closing arguments. And for Alexandre Novion, this sentence requested by the Advocate General is “a huge sentence for a 55-year-old man.” And he asks the jury to temper the sentence requested by the attorney general “by his suffering. In the extenuating circumstances you will retain depression, loneliness, heredity and then that it is not a utilitarian crime, it did not give him anything. It is brutal, yes but all the crimes are brutal.” And Thierry Roché’s lawyer to recall: “All the accumulated sentences will not return Sylvie Salmon. And if, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you place yourself on the side of the victims, it is compassion, it is not justice.”