The Court of Cassation rejected Tuesday, June 16 an appeal from Jean-Marc Reiser, indicted for the assassination of Strasbourg student Sophie Le Tan and who requested the cancellation of potentially overwhelming evidence.
Read also: Murder of Sophie Le Tan: rejection of a request for release of the suspect
Arguing of too long a delay between the notification of disputed expert reports and the motion for a declaration of invalidity presented by the defense of this 59-year-old man, "the Court dismissed the appeal" in a judgment consulted by AFP. In October 2019, the Colmar Court of Appeal had already rejected this request presented by the lawyers of Jean-Marc Reiser, suspected of having murdered the 20-year-old student, who disappeared after responding to a real estate ad he had filed.
Read also: New investigations into a disappearance in connection with Jean-Marc Reiser
Counsel for the suspect, already convicted of rape, had requested that the documents relating to the seizure at the home of their client of several objects - some covered with traces of the young woman's blood - be removed from the investigation file, considering that this seizure was akin to "disguised searches" carried out without the suspect's presence. "Now the procedural questions are definitively settled and there is no longer any obstacle to there being a trial," said Me Patrice Spinosi, lawyer for the Le Tan family before the Court of Cassation.
Read also: Sophie Le Tan case: request for a new investigation into a disappearance in 1987
Arrested a few days after the student's disappearance, Jean-Marc Reiser himself posted the announcement to which Sophie Le Tan had replied. Significant traces of blood, which had been sought to be erased, were discovered at his home, as were traces of DNA on the handle of a saw. But it will have taken more than a year to find the incomplete skeleton of the young woman in a Vosges forest in the Bas-Rhin, where Jean-Marc Reiser, who continues to claim his innocence, went regularly.
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