The trial of Jonathann Daval, who confessed to the murder of his wife Alexia in 2017, was finally scheduled for November in Vesoul after it was initially postponed due to the coronavirus epidemic, AFP learned on Tuesday from concordant sources.
Read also: Jonathann Daval is "relieved" (lawyer)
" The trial of Jonathann Daval will be held for five days, from November 16 to 20, at the historic Courthouse in Vesoul ", confirmed to the AFP the public prosecutor in Vesoul Emmanuel Dupic. Faced with the interest that this trial is likely to arouse, " an organizational device will be put in place in September, steered by the Besançon Court of Appeal ," he continued.
The trial before the Assize Court of Haute-Saône was postponed to March 2021 due to the coronavirus epidemic. But the new date exceeded the legal period of detention on remand, specified Me Randall Schwerdorffer, lawyer of Jonathann Daval. " I am relieved that the trial will take place in November, March was extremely far away, " he said.
Me Schwerdorffer expects his client to be " as spontaneous and as free as possible in his statements ". " For it to be well judged, we will have to be as close to the truth as possible, " he said. Jonathann Daval is to be tried for " murder on a spouse ", facts punishable by life imprisonment.
Alexia Daval, a 29-year-old bank employee, was found dead, hidden under branches and partially burned, on October 30, 2017 in Haute-Saône. Her husband Jonathann had first pretended to be a grieving husband for three months, without news of his wife jogging, before admitting to having hit and strangled her on the night of October 27 to 28, 2017 at their home of Gray-la-Ville (Haute-Saône), during a violent marital quarrel. Following a reconstruction of the murder carried out on June 17, Jonathann Daval had admitted having carried out the partial cremation of Alexia's body in a nearby wood.
