On Monday May 2, the Angers criminal court acquitted a veterinarian tried for having written false prescriptions to help one of his friends, suffering from Charcot’s disease, die. A first in the history of French justice, according to the defense lawyer. But the prosecution appealed this decision on Thursday, a franceinfo journalist learned on Friday May 6.
The case begins in the spring of 2018. This veterinarian meets a man in a café who tells him about the unbearable suffering caused by his neurodegenerative disease which gradually weakens all his muscles, condemns him to paralysis and certain death. He claims to have only three to five years left to live.
A few months later, this man asked him for a prescription for a drug reserved for animals in France, but tested in Canada on people with Charcot’s disease. The veterinarian refuses at first, then complies by prescribing the drug to a dog which however does not exist. The treatment works first, then the disease takes over.
The patient made several suicide attempts by mutilation and drowning, without succeeding. He then asks for a new prescription, this time for a deadly drug. The veterinarian refuses, hesitates, then gives in. He prescribes medication and informs her of the procedure to follow. The man fails for the first time, then is found dead at his home on May 21, 2019. Next to him, a few words are found: “Most importantly, let me go this time.”
An investigation is opened and, very quickly, the investigators go back to the veterinarian. He acknowledges having written the orders “out of humanity to assist this friend who had insisted a lot” and who was going very badly, explains his lawyer. He was first indicted for “attempted murder” but the charges were quickly reclassified as “forgery in writing” and “use of forgery”, because the veterinarian did not give the medicine to this man himself. just before his death.
The trial takes place and on Monday May 2, 2022, the criminal court finally decides to release the defendant due to what it calls “the state of necessity”. This corresponds to Article 122-7 of the Penal Code: “A person is not criminally liable who, faced with a present or imminent danger which threatens himself, others or property, performs an act necessary to safeguard his person or property, unless there is a disproportion between the means employed and the seriousness of the threat. A principle used for the first time by a judge in 1898, to exonerate a woman who had stolen bread to feed her child.
“We are in similar circumstances, comments to franceinfo the lawyer of the veterinarian, Me Antoine Barret, since it was for a person to help a friend to escape, in accordance with his wish, the pangs of a terrible illness and a certain end of life.” “From this observation, add the lawyerthe simple fact of committing forgery in writing such as prescriptions may seem totally indifferent or subordinate to the human issue that slips behind this situation.
But the public prosecutor of Angers, Eric Bouillard, is not of this opinion. “The state of necessity requires a proportion between the facts and the objective pursued, he explains to franceinfo, There must also be no other possibilities but to do so, but there are others and I think that the court must remain within this framework”. Eric Bouillard therefore appealed against the judgment rendered on Monday.
The veterinarian’s lawyer hopes that the court of appeal will confirm the release of his client and that this will reopen the debate on assisted suicide, still prohibited in France.