The appeal trial of a 27-year-old man sentenced earlier this year for the murder of a woman he confessed to having committed to “know the feeling of taking life”, opened on Monday October 3 before the Assize Court of Mende.
“
You recognize a murder, but not an assassination?
“, That is to say premeditation, asked the president of the Assize Court of Lozère.
“
Yes
”, replied Mathieu Danel, who appealed his sentence of life imprisonment with a 22-year security period for premeditated murder pronounced on January 18 by the Assize Court of Nîmes (Gard) .
Hair cut in brush, small neat beard and sweater in V, Mathieu Danel followed with attention the constitution of the popular jury, composed of eight men, a woman and three magistrates.
The hearing then continued with the hearing by videoconference of a gendarme who intervened at the start of the case.
“Nothing personal” against his victim
On June 21, 2018, this hitherto uneventful young man went to the police station in his hometown of Montélimar (Drôme) to confess to a homicide committed two days earlier in Sommières, Gard.
After having dinner with his future victim, a woman he had picked up hitchhiking, he had killed her with several blows from a hunting dagger purchased three weeks earlier.
He only wanted "
to know the feeling of taking life
", he then explained to the investigators, claiming to have confided to his victim, by hitting her, that he had "
nothing personal
" against her.
The victim, Claire Reynier, 39, had received 17 dagger blows, carried with "
very great violence
", according to the medical examiner.
The Nîmes Assize Court held him responsible for his actions and pointed to an "
extremely worrying state of danger
".
She had followed the indictment of the Advocate General, who had demanded a "
penalty of elimination
" without hope of leaving prison.
The psychiatrists had ruled out any mental illness and it was therefore at the level of his psychology, of a megalomaniacal type, and his life course, where failures at school and in love followed one another, that they had issued some hypotheses but no real explanation.
