It’s wrong to pardon this murderer

Robert Redeker
Le Figaro

François Hollande has made yet another terrible
decision, said Robert Redeker, only this time the
public and the media are applauding him for it.
The French president recently granted a pardon to
Jacqueline Sauvage, a woman serving 10 years in
prison for murdering her husband. She’d endured
47 years of horrific abuse at the hands of her
alcoholic husband, who also raped her and their
three daughters and abused their son. In 2012,
the day after their son hanged himself, Sauvage,
who is now 69, shot her husband three times in
the back with his own rifle. The judges convicted
her of murder in 2014, and the sentence was
upheld on appeal in December. It was the legally
correct decision, but to satisfy an outraged public,
Hollande overturned the judges’ verdict by resorting
to a seldom-used presidential pardon. Where
does this end? Will the president now pardon the
tobacconist Luc Fournié, 59, who shot dead a
17-year-old robber? No one is shedding tears for
Fournié—the young delinquent he killed is being
treated as the real victim “in spite of all reality
and common sense—yet he, too, could claim
extreme provocation. The key point is that it’s
not the public’s business to decide which crimes
committed in self-defense are good and which are
bad. That is precisely why we have the law and
legal professionals in the first place.


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