2023-06-29 15:42:05
Sophie Le Tan’s family lawyer, Gérard Welzer, kisses Thi Huong, Sophie Le Tan’s mother, after the verdict, before the Colmar Court of Appeal, June 29, 2023. PATRICK HERTZOG / AFP
The appeal trial will not have changed anything. Jean-Marc Reiser was sentenced on Thursday June 29 by the Haut-Rhin Assize Court to the same sentence as at first instance: life imprisonment with twenty-two years of security for the assassination of Sophie Le Tan in 2018. He will also have to pay a total of 435,000 euros in civil interest to the relatives of the young woman.
“You are found guilty of the assassination of Sophie Le Tan”, said the president of the court, Christine Schlumberger, after approximately three hours of deliberation. The accused showed no emotion at the verdict. “I am not a cold and bloodthirsty monster”had yet tried to plead the 62-year-old man in his last speech.
If he admitted to having killed the young student of 20 years of Vietnamese origin “in a fit of fury”, then having dismembered her with a hacksaw before going to bury the remains of her body in a forest, he however always denied having premeditated his gesture. But the jurors did not follow the arguments of this man with a heavy judicial past, tried in a state of legal recidivism after a first conviction for rape and sexual assault in 2003, and who was facing his sixth assize trial.
The jurors followed the Advocate General’s requisitions and pronounced the same sentence as in the first instance, the heaviest sentence incurred. “We must respect this decision”, soberly reacted one of his lawyers, Me Emmanuel Spano, who could not immediately indicate whether his client intended to appeal in cassation. He has five days to do so.
“We are relieved by this verdict”, reacted the mother of Sophie, Huong Le Tan, speaking in Vietnamese. But “The pain of the loss of our daughter will follow me until the end of my life. We don’t want revenge, but it is important that society be protected from the actions of these types of individuals. “Justice has passed”reacted one of their advisers, Me Gérard Welzer, welcoming a trial “exemplary” which will have nevertheless constituted ” a test “ extra for the family.
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“A Fit of Fury”
The jurors answered yes to the four questions put to them: is the accused guilty of having deliberately committed violence against Sophie Le Tan? Did the violence lead to death? Did he intend to kill? Did he premeditate his actions? Dismembered with a hacksaw, Sophie Le Tan had been buried on the edge of the forest. The body of the 20-year-old student was finally discovered a year later by mushroom pickers.
Five years and two assize trials later, certain gray areas persist, in particular the exact cause of the student’s death: the state of decomposition of the corpse did not make it possible to determine it. In these circumstances, two versions clashed throughout the eight days of this trial. The prosecution argued that Jean-Marc Reiser, a former category A civil servant, a graduate in Byzantine archeology, had knowingly devised a scheme to lure a student into a trap at his home, in order to sexually abuse her, before killing her, premeditated.
The defence, on the contrary, stuck to the confessions of the suspect, made at the very end of the investigation, when all the experts had given conclusions to which he had had access. And which therefore allowed him perhaps to adapt his version… According to his story, he had tried, after visiting his apartment, to take Sophie Le Tan’s hand and give her a kiss. She then pushed him away insulting him, provoking him “a fit of fury” which resulted in multiple kicks and punches.
The student, featherweight (1.55 meters, less than 55 kilos) facing a hefty landlord (1.88 meters, more than 90 kilos at the time), then collapsed, fatally hitting the toilet bowl. The defense thus hoped that the jurors would retain only “battery and injury resulting in death without the intention of giving it”, which would have implied a symbolically less heavy sentence of thirty years of imprisonment.
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