If Marine Le Pen no longer pleads for the return of the death penalty, she does, however, want to introduce life imprisonment. “I will put in place real life. What the French really want is real life”she said on France 2. Except that since then, the Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti, answered him on RTL. “It exists, it is written in full in the Penal Code.” Who is telling the truth? The True of False Unit answers you.
What is called real or incompressible perpetuity does exist in France. It is found in the Criminal Code, it is articles 221-3 and 4. This sanction is the most severe of our law and it concerns three very specific types of cases: the murders of minors under 15 years of age with rape, torture or acts of barbarism, but also the murder of police officers, gendarmes, prison guards or magistrates because of their functions. And finally terrorist crimes.
These sentences, on the other hand, are rarely pronounced. There are only a handful of people sentenced to real life, we can notably cite the case of the serial killer Michel Fourniret, who died in prison in 2021.
Does that mean that a person sentenced to real life will never get out of prison? Yes and no. In France, the principle is that any prisoner must keep a hope of getting out of prison one day, even if he is thin. This is also guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights.
Clearly, even a criminal sentenced to irreducible life has the right to request a review of his sentence. On the other hand, the conditions are much stricter. For example, he will have to spend at least 30 years behind bars. And unlike other prisoners, those who are sentenced to life imprisonment are not content to go before the sentence enforcement judge. They are also received by experts who assess their degree of dangerousness before five judges of the Court of Cassation decide whether or not to end the incompressible nature of their sentence.