Mamadou Diallo sentenced on appeal to sixteen years in prison

When the verdict was announced, after more than three hours of deliberation, the accused buried his head in his hands for a long time. Mamadou Diallo was sentenced Thursday, October 19 on appeal to 16 years in prison for the murder of a postal worker in Ain, after being acquitted at first instance. A final twist in an affair which has not lacked one.

The jurors of the Rhône Assize Court found that this 34-year-old man was guilty of voluntarily killing Catherine Burgod, a 41-year-old woman found stabbed in the small postal agency of Montréal-la-Cluse (Ain) in December 2008, during a flight.

Thirty years had been required

Mamadou Diallo is “victim of a terrible miscarriage of justice”denounced his lawyer Sylvie Noachovitch. “We did not apply the law: the law is that doubt must benefit the accused”, she reacted, announcing that her client was going to appeal to the Court of Cassation. With a sentence well below the requisitions, she believes that the decision was made “to appease the victims”. “We had to put a name to this crime”according to her.

The defense supports another version of the facts: that of the guilt of the actor who has become marginalized Gérald Thomassin, whose celebrity had helped to publicize the case. The Advocate General, who had requested 30 years of imprisonment, had devoted the first part of his indictment to “crucify” this hypothesis involving the actor, a notorious drug addict, who lived opposite the postal agency and for a long time served as “ideal culprit”.

For the civil parties, it is the end of a fifteen-year fight, underlined their lawyer, Jean-François Barre. “We are never satisfied with a man who goes to prison. The family’s fight was guilt, the punishment belongs to society”he declared after the verdict.