A fifty-year-old who was prosecuted for having mutilated many cats around Caen while he was under medication was declared criminally irresponsible Wednesday by the court of appeal. The defendant was retried for having dislocated or broken the legs of 15 cats between May and June 2018.
In its judgment, “the court considered that, at the time of the facts, this 53-year-old man suffered from a disorder which caused an abolition of his discernment and the control of his acts”, explained President Jeanne Chéenne. He was declared criminally irresponsible and therefore received no penalty.
The drug treatment involved?
Six months suspended prison sentence had been requested by the public prosecutor’s office at the hearing on June 21, 2021. At first instance, in June 2018, the defendant, a former executive director of a large automobile company in the Caen region, had been sentenced to 18 months in prison, including nine months closed and had appealed against the judgment.
The court of appeal took into account the arguments of the defense, which had put forward the drug treatment followed by the engineer to explain his actions. Suffering from Parkinson’s disease, he had been on treatment between 2015 and 2018.
The alteration of his judgment due to the taking of these drugs had already been retained by the correctional court of Caen last February in another case: the fifty-something had then been sentenced to a fine of 500 euros for having stabbed a dog, a Beauceron, during a visit to the Verson SPA, on April 1, 2017.
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