With this court decision handed down on Thursday, those close to Raymond Mis and Gabriel Thiennot hope that they will be posthumously exonerated for the murder of a game warden. A look back at this affair which has been going on since the end of the Second World War.
“It’s a huge relief, especially since honestly, I didn’t expect it.” Thierry, the son of Gabriel Thiennot, has been fighting for 40 years to have his father exonerated and he no longer believed much in justice. The decision fell on Thursday, October 5: the Court of Review is seized of the Raymond Mis and Gabriel Thiennot case. The seventh request for review filed by their relatives finally allows them to hope that posthumously, the two men will be exonerated. They were both convicted of the murder of a gamekeeper, after having confessed under torture, before retracting.
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“The first thought goes to my father, that’s a certainty. For him, it was the fight of his life. The first thing I’m going to do is go to the cemetery and tell him ‘well, we’re there at the penultimate stage'”, breathes Thierry Thiennot. This penultimate stage presents itself with a major change: the confessions of Mis and Thiénnot are no longer in the procedure, because they were obtained under torture.
“Ideal culprits”
“It was the day after the Liberation, there was a police commissioner who was known for having extremely violent practices and for having supported the Vichy regime, explains Pierre-Emmanuel Blard, one of the lawyers on their support committee. Raymond Mis and Gabriel Thiennot who were two young people, one a communist, the other a well-known resistance fighter in the department. They were, pardon the expression, ideal culprits.”
The business started just after the Second World War, in the middle of the Brenne ponds in Indre. The body of game warden Louis Boistard was discovered on December 29, 1946. He was killed by four gunshots. Finding the culprits becomes an emergency: 14 hunters are arrested. Among them, Raymond Mis, son of Poland, and Gabriel Thiennot, from a poor family.
“We were on our knees, on an iron ruler, completely naked for hours on end. We had to hold on as long as possible and when we collapsed, they put buckets of water in our faces.”
Gabriel Thiennot, during a television interview
Raymond Mis and Gabriel Thiennot are held inside the town hall of Mézières-en-Brenne. Nobody sees anything but in the city, we hear “the cries of pain”. After eight days of torture, the two men, barely 20 years old, signed confessions, before retracting, very quickly, and too late: they were sentenced to 15 years of forced labor.
“We will never forget, until we die”
Raymond Mis and Gabriel Thiennot were finally pardoned by President René Coty in 1954, after having served half of their sentence. Their release also marks the start of a long fight to have their innocence recognized. “It happened to us that we were told ‘we should forget all that’, but that’s not possible, we will never forget, until we die”they later testified, before dying.
As the years pass, so do the requests for review to have the case retried. Both men died, but their families continued the fight. Finally, an amendment submitted to the Senate two years ago, by the current Minister of Justice Eric Dupont-Moretti, changed everything. He was adopted. The case was referred to the Court of Review on Thursday. Gabriel Thiennot’s widow now only hopes for one thing, as she explained in an interview: “Go to his grave and tell him ‘there you are, you are recognized as innocent by everyone’”.