Paris the…

Another scandalous acquittal

This time it concerns a butcher boy who, in a barracks in Saint-Ouen, killed his wife with four gunshots because he suspected her of cheating on him. His crime accomplished, this man went on foot to the Palais de Justice from where he was sent to the nearest police station. There, we deigned to arrest him. He was put in prison for six months. Afterwards the jury thought he had been punished enough and acquitted him.

I don't think I'm an ogre. Solutions of force and rigor naturally disgust me. And this is precisely why the solution of the gunshot, in marital conflicts, seems particularly reprehensible to me.

I don't believe I have a bias in favor of women either, and on this point readers have often criticized me, which I perhaps deserved, by accusing me of misogyny. But my misogyny, real or imagined, does not prevent me from thinking that, when a man is cheated on by his wife, nine times out of ten it is his fault. Nine times out of ten it's because the man is a bully.

And it is this brute that the Seine jury systematically acquits! Such a strange weakness can only be explained by the following reasoning:

We acquit this murderer because, if so many of his peers had not been acquitted before him, he would undoubtedly not have felt authorized to kill.

In this case, the real culprit is not him, it is us, it is the jurors who sat here before us and whose absurd verdicts created among jealous husbands the impression that they could kill their woman with tranquility…

Conclusion: continue to acquit the jealous with all their might, or else send to prison, for the rest of his life, the first murderous husband who comes along, which would give others pause.

This second solution, have no doubt, is the right one.

André Billy