The Attorney General at the Court of Cassation took the time to reflect before responding in the negative, on Wednesday June 8, to the request for “appeal in the interest of the law” made by Emily Spanton’s lawyers and by a feminist collective on April 24, following the acquittal of the two police officers accused of gang rape at 36, quai des Orfèvres. This decision on appeal reversed an initial verdict convicting the two officials to seven years in prison, pronounced by the Paris Assize Court on January 31, 2019.
On the night of April 22 to 23, 2014, Emily Spanton, a Canadian tourist, had met several police officers from the Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI) in an Irish pub near 36, quai des Orfèvres, the headquarters of the Paris judicial police. After several drinks and exchanges of kisses with officials, the young woman was offered a visit to the premises of the brigade. She did not come out until an hour later, in a state of shock, to immediately denounce the unwanted sexual relations to the officials guarding the building.
An unusual procedure
In the reasoning for its judgment, the Assize Court of Appeal had noted the “many inaccuracies, imprecisions, even several lies” by Emily Spanton, as well as data from telephony and CCTV, including the timings “does not allow the existence of multiple successive sexual scenes to be declared coherent (…) in a very limited time. She also relied on the conclusions of a psychiatric expert’s report by the complainant, according to which “Emily Spanton’s personality, her state of alcoholism at the time of the facts, her speech on the alleged facts lead, without it being possible to formally invalidate her testimony, to lay down strong reservations as to the possibility of relying on his only testimony. The court and the jurors had thus found that “the persistent doubts in the relationship of the facts and the apprehension of the various objective elements of the file” should benefit the defendants.
The defence, supported by a feminist group, then tried to obtain an “appeal in the interest of the law”, an unusual procedure entrusted by the legislator to the public prosecutor at the Court of Cassation or to the Keeper of the Seals. Unlike ordinary appeals, which may result in the decision being quashed, an appeal in the interest of the law cannot call into question the acquittal decision, which is final. It has only a doctrinal interest, in the sense that its purpose is to examine whether the reasons for the judgment of acquittal are “in law and in law only conforms to legal requirements”as recalled by the Attorney General, François Molins, in his written response to the plaintiffs.
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