A seventh petition for review has just been filed, this Wednesday, to obtain the cancellation of the convictions of Gabriel Thiennot and Raymond Mis to fifteen years of forced labor. Three assize courts (between 1947 and 1950) found them guilty of having killed the gamekeeper Louis Boistard, at the end of December 1946, whose body was found in a pond in Saint-Michel-en-Brenne (Indre). And six previous requests for review have so far been rejected.
But in the forty years that I have fought to have their innocence recognized, I had never glimpsed the prospect of a victory so close.
, believes however Léandre Boizeau, honorary president of the Mis and Thiennot support committee. So why such optimism? Because at the end of December 2021, the law on criminal review was amended. It now stipulates that the commission of instruction of the court of revision can annul declarations collected following violence by investigators
. And this, for cases dating from before 1958, when a new code of criminal procedure was introduced.
“We can talk about torture”
But that is the whole dilemma of this case. At the end of a police custody of several days (almost nine for Gabriel Thiennot), the two suspects, then aged 19, had confessed to the murder. We can indeed speak of violence, even torture
recalls Me Jean-Pierre Mignard, lawyer of the support committee with Me Pierre-Emmanuel Brard.
Needle punches in the flesh, corkscrews in the ribs, kneeling on a rod… nothing was spared them. A prison doctor will acknowledge having observed traces of beatings when they arrived in prison. This violence, however mentioned from the assize trials, had not however prevented the convictions. Nor had they allowed a revision since, according to the texts, only a new fact made a new trial possible until then. But the judges told us: in this case, everything has been said!
laments Me Mignard.
Annulment of confessions?
From now on, from a legal point of view, there is nothing more to prevent the high magistrates from modifying the outcome of the Mis and Thiennot affair. However, without these confessions, no investigation has confirmed the accusation
, notes Me Brard. The lawyers therefore requested, initially, that the confessions collected by the investigators be canceled. They hope for a first hearing next fall. Then that the file is transmitted to the court of revision so that it cancels the convictions. A decision is expected in 2023.
The support committee is therefore hopeful of winning the case. Léandre Boizeau (1) recalls that during the presidential pardon, granted by President René Coty in 1954 (which put an end to their imprisonment, but which did not annul the convictions), an investigation had been carried out by the Chancellery. It revealed that the investigators were accustomed to such violence, since in a previous case, they had made people confess to a murder who had not committed it.
I just ask the magistrates to apply the law
, soberly concluded Thierry Thiennot, the son of Gabriel Thiennot, during a press briefing in Paris. Gabriel Thiennot and Raymond Mis died in 2003 and 2009.
(1): author of “Mis and Thiennot, a life of combat”, La Bouinotte editions.
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