Dr Frédéric Péchier, indicted for 24 poisonings of patients, will he be able to practice medicine again? The Besançon public prosecutor announced on Thursday that he was going to challenge this possibility granted to the anesthetist on Wednesday. “I am going to seize the investigating magistrate with an increase in the judicial control”, announced Étienne Manteaux, considering that it was in his eyes “not a single moment conceivable” that Frédéric Péchier, certainly “presumed innocent” but put in examination, “be authorized to practice the profession of doctor”.
The prosecutor was speaking the day after the decision of the investigating chamber of the Besançon Court of Appeal validating the possibility for Frédéric Péchier to work again as a doctor, excluding his specialty, however, anesthesia. However, it is the Council of the Order of Physicians who will ultimately say whether or not he can practice again, said the investigating chamber, which also lightened its judicial review. Dr. Péchier was notably authorized to return to the Doubs, where his children reside. On the other hand, he must keep his main residence in Vienne, where he lives with his parents.
According to Étienne Manteaux, the judgment delivered on Wednesday constitutes a “strict reading” and a clarification of the “terms used by the judge of freedoms and detention” (JLD) who had left Dr. Péchier free under judicial control by prohibiting him “from to practice the profession of anesthesiologist. A wording which had since been understood by “everyone” as “a general ban on practicing the profession of doctor”, in particular by the suspect and his advisers who had therefore seized the investigating chamber to be able to exercise the profession again. medicine.
End of training this summer?
One of the messages from the investigating chamber, explained Étienne Manteaux, is also to ask “legal actors” that “this judicial investigation ends”: the investigation, which began in 2017, “is becoming very long “. This is a case “out of the ordinary in all respects” and “very complex but it must (it) end and I can assure you that we are all well aware of it”, he insisted , citing the objective of closing the judicial investigation “in the summer of 2023”.
A date which “will obviously depend a lot on the defense” of the doctor, according to the requests for expertise or counter-expertise that they could request, nuanced the prosecutor. All of the expert reports should indeed be returned at the beginning of February and Frédéric Péchier is summoned by the examining magistrate in March for “nine successive interrogations”, in particular around eight new cases of poisoning for which he is suspected, added Etienne Manteaux.
Frédéric Péchier, 50, is suspected of having polluted the infusion bags of patients to cause cardiac arrest and then demonstrate his skills as a resuscitator, but also discredit colleagues with whom he was in conflict. He is indicted for 24 cases of poisoning, including nine fatalities. Since September, he has also been suspected of eight new cases of potential poisoning of patients, including four fatalities. The practitioner has claimed his innocence since the start of the case.