How to put down a brilliant career as a lawyer in a few weeks? This is the infernal circle described Friday, July 22 before the Poitiers Criminal Court, where the case was out of place because of the profession of the defendant. Because Patrice Brossy, 51, has gone from the bench of lawyers to the glass box of imprisoned defendants.
The lawyer from La Rochelle is being prosecuted for a series of violence with weapons, against a gas station cashier, a car dealership, the owner of her home and her son, not to mention her colleagues, starting with the chairman, “patroness” of lawyers in La Rochelle and Rochefort. Acts committed under the influence of psychiatric disorders.
“I am bipolar”easily admits Patrice Brossy when asked about his personality. “Like my father and my sister. I survived 35 years without drugs, and then there was the death of my best friend.” In a flood of words, the lawyer explains how to resist the annoyance badly, for lack of suitable treatment. Tells her taste for staging, provocation.
Panic at the AGM of lawyers
The culmination of this psychiatric crisis, an incredible intrusion at the general assembly of lawyers of La Rochelle-Rochefort, at the end of June in Fouras. Patrice Brossy arrives surrounded by two giants, security guards hired for the occasion. Then crosses the room, bag in hand. Is he hiding a weapon? “I said to myself: I am going to die”, testifies the batonniere Catherine Cibot, when colleagues believe they are at the Bataclan. Especially since his colleague launches a disturbing: “It’s going to go wrong!”
Same panic fear in the testimony read by the cashier of a service station, in front of which the lawyer exhibits a gas gun, to settle a futile problem with a bank card. Trauma again from its owner, threatened with a sledgehammer and a machete, simply because she had crossed the threshold of her accommodation. “We could laugh about it, but in the end it’s sad” lets go of his Poitevin lawyer Laurent Sillard.
In the end, few regrets in the mouth of Patrice Brossy, who bravado: “I stop the job, I’m going to do theater in Italy”. His lawyer tries to correct the picture: “It’s not prison that Patrice Brossy needs, but care, care, more care.” And to regret the impossibility for the court to order compulsory hospitalizationprerogative of the administrative authority (prefect, commissioner, etc.).
Weapons seized
For his part, the psychiatrist expert who briefly met Patrice Brossy had pointed to an “alteration” of Patrice Brossy’s discernment, but not his “abolition”, paving the way for a criminal conviction. In his requisitions, the Poitiers prosecutor Cyril Lacombe had claimed three years in prison, including 18 months. President Emmanuelle Guédon pronounces a sentence halved: 18 months including 8 months firm, “in the name of the seriousness of the facts, the number of victims and the concern for the future”. The lawyer’s weapons are seized. Patrice Brossy will no longer have the right to hold it for five years.