A 15-year-old teenager was sentenced to 18 years in prison on Thursday for the murder of a supervisor at his middle school in Haute-Marne last year. The case caused a stir throughout France.
July 17, 2026, 02:25Jul 17, 2026, 2:27 am
The prison sentence, which was greeted with applause in the courtroom, corresponds to the prosecution’s request. Due to his young age, the defendant was sentenced in camera before the youth court in Chaumont and faced a maximum of 20 years in prison.
In contrast to the prosecutor’s requests, the court recognized that the young person had reduced mental capacity at the time of the crime and assumed that, according to the chairwoman, he was suffering from paranoia.
However, the court rejected the reduction of the sentence by a third due to the reduced mental capacity, due to the “extreme seriousness of the crime” and because the defendant had shown “no compassion, no remorse and no regret regarding the crime,” emphasized the chairwoman.
Pointing to his extreme “psychiatric danger,” which entailed an “extreme risk of relapse,” the court combined the prison sentence with ten years of social court care and a requirement for treatment.
On June 10, 2025, the teenager killed a 31-year-old educational assistant at the Collège Françoise-Dolto in Nogent by stabbing him in front of the school. She was the mother of a little boy. The crime occurred in front of numerous witnesses during an unannounced bag check of the students by gendarmes in front of the school, which was specifically aimed at detecting possible stabbing weapons.
The then 14-year-old ninth-grade student was overpowered by a gendarme on site, inflicting an injury on his hand during the arrest. (sda/afp)