Delivery Driver from Lunel Sentenced to One Year in Prison: 20th Conviction for Multiple Offenses

With his suit, his shirt and his little glasses, Soufien does not look like someone who has been convicted 19 times. This 30-year-old appeared, however, for five offenses committed on the same day, before the Montpellier Criminal Court.

Obviously suffering from an alcoholism problem, he has already been convicted three times for domestic violence, including one on his current partner last November. He did it again on April 23 in Lunel.

Despite an electronic bracelet and the ban on contact with his wife, with whom he has had a chaotic relationship for three years, he took her home after sharing a drunken meal. A wave of violence ensued.

“He gave me two big slaps in the head, had testified the victim – absent at the hearing – to the gendarmes. Then he continued to kick me and hit my head on a corner of the table. He sat on me, I was screaming because I was choking. Then he started choking me and I scratched him to free myself.

That’s when the municipal police knocked on the door, after hearing screams from outside. “He refused to open, saying there was no problem,” said the prosecutor. “He asked me to shut up but I screamed,” said the victim.

The police entered the apartment, discovering a woman in tears and bearing numerous traces of blows, and the gendarmes arrived.

Soufien then chained the offenses: refusal to lend himself to the verification of his alcoholic state, death threats against his companion (“I am going to behead her and put her head on the counter of the gendarmerie”), kicks breaking the window rear of the police vehicle.

“She scratched me and I answered a little loudly”

And later, new death threats against a nurse who wanted to administer a tranquilizer at the doctor’s request (“I’m going to saw off both your shins and kill you and your family”).

Judged three weeks after the facts, the delivery driver from Lunell had had time to calm down. But like almost all perpetrators of domestic violence, he minimized his role. “She scratched me and I answered a little loudly, she fell between the sofa and the table,” he mimed.

Explanations incompatible with the facts. “We must stop taking the court for fools, replied Caroline Chambon on behalf of the public prosecutor. The victim had a huge bump on the head and bruises all over his body.”

And to regret that with this defendant, “all the warnings of justice are useless”. She requested 24 months of imprisonment, 6 of which were probationary suspended for two years.

“The victim invited himself to his home to question him about his infidelities, pleaded Me Chabert, the defendant’s lawyer. He was trapped. All the facts that followed stem from his state of intoxication.”

Soufien was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment, with further detention. The court chaired by Christine Castaing did not issue a probationary stay, knowing that the defendant must already respect two. In particular, he has an obligation to take care of himself, which he has still not done.

He will have to pay €1,500 to the nurse he had threatened. The sum allocated to the gendarmes will be defined later. As for the victim of the violence, she had not asked for damages.