The widow and three children of Gabriel Thiennot, who died in 2003, and the former companion of Raymond Mis, who died in 2009, are calling for the cancellation of the convictions pronounced against the two young men, in 1950, for a murder that the two hunters have always denied, on the basis, according to them, of confessions obtained under torture.
“I hope this seventh request will be the right one,” said Thierry Thiennot, one of Gabriel Thiennot’s sons, during a press conference on Wednesday afternoon.
Raymond Mis and Gabriel Thiennot had been sentenced in July 1950, at the end of a third trial, to fifteen years of hard labor for the murder of Louis Boistard, a game warden found dead on December 31, 1946 in a pond in Saint-Michel. -en-Brenne (Indre).
Arrested with a group of six other young hunters, Raymond Mis, then 21 years old, and Gabriel Thiennot, 20, confessed in early 1947 during nine days in police custody, before recanting.
They then never ceased to proclaim their innocence, denouncing the serious abuse suffered.
The two men were pardoned in 1954 by President René Coty, but this pardon did not cancel their conviction.
In a long fight against a “miscarriage of justice”, continued to their death by their relatives, six previous requests for review have been filed since 1980, and all rejected, the last in 2015.
This seventh request is based on a legislative development which has paved the way for a review of this case.
– “Close to success” –
“We are at the origin of this legislative change. We can hope,” said Me Jean-Pierre Mignard, one of the lawyers for the families and the Mis and Thiennot support committee.
“We are very close to success”, estimated Léandre Boizeau, the president of this support committee created in 1980 and very active in Berry, where 28 municipalities have a street, a square or a “Mis et Thiennot” space. .
In this case where justice has been “deaf, blind”, the magistrates have “for once all the cards in hand”, opined Thierry Thiennot.
In their sixth motion for review, the families of Raymond Mis and Gabriel Thiennot had asked for the first time the cancellation of the minutes in which the statements of the two men obtained by torture had been recorded, underlined their other lawyer, Me Pierre- Emmanuel Blard.
But the justice had considered that this violence could not be considered as “new facts” likely to have their conviction revised, insofar as they had already been debated before the three assize courts which judged the case.
A provision of the law for confidence in the judicial institution, promulgated on December 22, 2021, now allows the investigating committee of the Court of Revision to proceed with the cancellation of the documents in a file when the conviction results from statements collected “following violence by investigators”.
Only convictions pronounced by an Assize Court before the entry into force of the Code of Criminal Procedure in 1958 are concerned.
Referral to the investigation committee is only a first step. It will first have to rule on the admissibility of the motion and say whether it is transmitting to the Court of Revision the file expurgated of its litigious documents.
Only the latter can cancel the convictions of Raymond Mis and Gabriel Thiennot and “unload their memory”, that is to say rehabilitate them posthumously.
“This file only holds because there are confessions. Everything else risks collapsing like a house of cards”, predicted Me Jean-Pierre Mignard.
