It is the end of a legal marathon started last September before the special assize court of Paris. Friday, June 24, the lawyers of Salah Abdeslam, Martin Vettes and Olivia Ronen, pleaded to try to avoid their client the incompressible perpetuity, “the most severe penalty of the Penal Code”.
It was a moving, complex and infuriating audience. At the bar, facing a crowded room, Olivia Ronen has the difficult task of closing the defense arguments. She denounces the approximations, the fantasies of the prosecution. “Of course, we expect a heavy sanction. He accepted to be part of the commando. Salah Abdeslam was not scheduled for November 13. He was a last minute recruit. I know it’s difficult to believe and it is to follow his brother Brahim”. She insists on her renunciation of blowing herself up in a café in the 18th arrondissement. “He explained that he gave up out of humanitycontinues the lawyer. Not out of cowardice. A bite of conscience. So, if life is required, we lose all sense of proportion!” she says.
And the lawyer returns to the conditions of detention of Salah Abdeslam for six years: “Nine months without contact, without saying a single word. Man is a social animalsays Olivia Ronen. You take the social away from it and it’s just an animal. A plexiglass on his window, two cameras on him, he will be scrutinized every minute he eats, showers, relieves himself. It’s been six years, 2,250 days and 54,000 hours of film. All this so that he arrives alive at his trial, Mr. President!
Then it comes to the sentence required by the prosecution against Salah Abdeslam, “the most severe that exists in the Penal Code. Can we give the same sentence to the executor and to the sponsors of Daesh? she asks. Those ten months would have been for nothing.”
“Didn’t you see the armor crack? continues Olivia Ronen. Salah Abdeslam had the dress of a Daesh fighter, he found something to dress differently, after nine months of hearing. And yet, the incompressible perpetuity… Why would we put a double lock on his sentence? It is a terrible sentence, a slow death sentence, a white death. So I ask you to apply the law. If you follow the prosecutor’s office, terrorism won and it was all a joke.” concludes the lawyer. The verdict will be given on June 29.