Sentenced to 4 months in prison with a committal warrant, Damien Tarel will be taken to the Valence penitentiary at the end of the hearing.
The Valence Criminal Court sentences Damien Tarel to 18 months’ imprisonment, including 14 months suspended sentence with a committal warrant. Also prohibition to hold weapons for 5 years and to exercise any public function permanently and prohibition of civil rights for 3 years.
For the defendant’s lawyer: “We must distinguish the time of the media from the time of justice”.
Before denouncing: “media harassment towards the family and even their lawyer. We must not relocate justice in the media”.
“The act of my client was not premeditated, not thought out.” The lawyer continues: “He regrets his gesture. He wanted to debate. He realizes the consequences during his custody”.
On his personality: “He’s more of an intellectual. He is constantly in the debate. He has only been to a site that evokes the gas chambers once. He is a perfectly normal person who is not extreme. A young man who has never been talked about, very invested in the associative world. “
“He became aware of the seriousness of the facts. He will not repeat them. He did not at any time want to be an example. There should not be an exceptional justice, his criminal record is blank”, adds Me Elodie Guellier, lawyer for the accused.
“I ask you to sanction him but not to incarcerate him”.
For the public prosecutor, the prosecutor Alex Perrin returns to the facts: “It is a deliberate act of violence, deeply inadmissible. With this gesture he does not only have the will to strike but to lower, to humiliate. It is an intolerable attack on the institution, on the Presidency of the Republic. There is a kind of cold determination in the accused. There was no gratuitousness in this passage to the act “
The defendant faces up to 3 years in prison and a fine of 45,000 euros.
The prosecutor requires 18 months of imprisonment, as well as a warrant of committal.
The prosecutor is also asking for a definitive ban from exercising public office, and a ban on civil rights and holding a weapon for a period of 5 years.