After three years of denials, a 41-year-old woman confessed during her trial in Lyon this week to suffocating her two daughters.
She was sentenced Friday, December 17 to 28 years of criminal imprisonment.
The Rhône Assize Court upheld premeditation against Jamila El Rhoufi, the wife of a gendarme tried since Tuesday for this double infanticide committed, in June 2018, in the family apartment at the Limonest barracks , near Lyon.
Read also Gironde: a mother suspected of triple infanticide found dead in her cell
"
This is not a murderous madness, it is not a delirium, it is an act prepared, calculated, premeditated
", estimated the general counsel Charlotte Millon during her indictment, completed in 45 minutes. The magistrate called for a 30-year sentence with a two-thirds security period, an option not retained by the jury.
Jamila El Rhoufi was on trial for having killed her two daughters aged three and five in June 2018, in the absence of her husband who was participating in a sporting event in the Pyrenees.
After denying the facts until the trial, which opened on Tuesday, she finally confessed on Thursday to having killed the children by suffocating them, nodding when the president of the court asked her if she had used pillows.
The autopsy established that the two girls, who died several hours apart, succumbed to "
mechanical suffocation-type asphyxia
".
"Society cannot accept that life is taken for revenge"
The forty-year-old, described as an exclusive mother by psychological expertise, explained that she wanted to "
keep them
", in fear of joint custody in the divorce that was looming within the couple. But for the Advocate General, the criminal responsibility of the accused is "
full
", "
no psychic cause
" being able "to
excuse and explain her passage to the act
". "
Society cannot accept that we take the life out of revenge, that we take the life of our own children
", said the magistrate, accusing the accused of lying "
all the time
" and of asking "
as a victim
”.
In defense, lawyers Javotte de Brem and Alexandre Plantevin asked the jury to take into account the confession of the accused. "
It took energy and courage, a titanic internal struggle to finally be able to confide
", pleaded Me Plantevin. "
You judge a woman who takes responsibility for killing her two little daughters,
" insisted the defender, challenging a "
hopeless
"
indictment
.
“
I don't want to be reduced to a criminal mother out of revenge.
This is not the essential spring
", pleaded the lawyer, for whom the mother of the girls was"
invaded by a criminal whiff
"because of a"
narcissistic flaw
", of his"
childhood wounds
" , of "
his troubles and his anxieties
".
“
Her acting out is first of all the irrepressible fear of seeing another take her place, that another be more attentive than she is.
It is not to take revenge on him, it is to lose what it is
”, argued Me Plantevin.
