Jean-Marc Reiser definitively convicted for the assassination of Sophie Le Tan

The Court of Cassation rejected the appeal of the 63-year-old man, who challenged his conviction on appeal to life imprisonment for the assassination of the Strasbourg student in 2018.

The Court of Cassation rejected, on Wednesday June 26, the appeal of Jean-Marc Reiser, who challenged his conviction on appeal to life imprisonment for the assassination of Strasbourg student Sophie Le Tan in 2018, according to a ruling consulted by the AFP. In his appeal, Jean-Marc Reiser, 63, contested a point in the judgment of the Assize Court of Appeal of Colmar, which had confirmed in June 2023 the sentence pronounced at first instance, namely criminal imprisonment at life sentence, accompanied by a security period of twenty-two years.

This judgment mentioned in particular that the court had decided on this sentence “by a majority of at least eight votes” which, according to Mr. Reiser, violated “the secret of deliberations” and tainted “the deliberations of an absolute nullity”, according to the judgment of the criminal chamber of the Court of Cassation.

An argument swept aside by the court, which considers in particular that “the statement according to which these votes were acquired by a majority of at least eight votes did not infringe the secrecy of the deliberations”. As a result, she “rejects the appeal” of Jean-Marc Reiser, making his conviction final in this case. “The Court of Cassation considered that the procedure had been respected (…) We take note of this”, soberly reacted Emmanuel Spano, Jean-Marc Reiser’s lawyer,

If he admitted to having killed the 20-year-old student in September 2018 “in a fit of fury”, then dismembered her with a hacksaw before burying the remains of the body in a forest, Jean-Marc Reiser, on the other hand, always denied having premeditated his action.

On Monday, he also filed an appeal to the Supreme Court to contest his indictment in another case, that of the disappearance in 1987 in Strasbourg of Florence Hohmann, 23. In 2001, he was definitively acquitted, due to lack of evidence of the murder of this vacuum cleaner salesperson whose body was never found, even though he was the last person to have seen her alive.

But, in February 2020, evoking “new charges”, the Strasbourg public prosecutor’s office has reopened a judicial investigation in this case, not for murder – Jean-Marc Reiser having already been declared innocent, he cannot be retried for the same facts – but for “criminal arbitrary confinement” and “receiving of corpse”. In another case, Jean-Marc Reiser was convicted for the first time in 2003 for rape and sexual assault.