Marc Machin definitively sentenced to 16 years in prison, after withdrawing his appeal

Marc Machin, a former victim of miscarriage of justice, withdrew his appeal on Tuesday before the Assize Court of Val-de-Marne, where he was tried for the rape of a young woman under the threat of a weapon. .

He had been on appeal since Monday for this rape committed in 2018 under the threat of a weapon, extortion with a weapon, fraud, theft and invasion of home, for which he had been sentenced to sixteen years of criminal imprisonment, accompanied by a security period of eight years in 2021. On Tuesday, he withdrew his appeal in full hearing, AFP learned on Wednesday from his lawyer Me Adrien Gabeaud:

,” he said.

Fifteen convictions

“He realized this and did not want to prolong the suffering of the victim and his own unnecessarily”

, continued his lawyer.

This withdrawal

on Tuesday, confirmed a judicial source.

The civil party, then 22 years old, had denounced in April 2018 to the police the rape of which she had been the victim the same morning in an apartment in Paris by a hooded man who threatened her with a kitchen knife, before force her to erase the traces of the crime and to steal her credit card.

Confused by his DNA, Marc Machin, now 40 years old, had come to recognize the facts in police custody.

“My client, who greatly dreaded this appeal hearing, was infinitely relieved not to have to speak again before the Assize Court,”

her lawyer Me Audrey Dufau told AFP.

Marc Machin wrongfully spent six and a half years in prison for the Pont de Neuilly affair.

Imprisoned in 2001 at the age of 19, he was sentenced three years later to eighteen years' imprisonment for the stabbing murder of Marie-Agnès Bedot, a sentence confirmed on appeal.

But in March 2008, a 33-year-old homeless man, David Sagno, accused himself of this murder and that of another woman committed at the same place in 2002, which led to the release of Marc Machin.

In 2012, the latter ended up being acquitted at the end of his retrial, becoming the eighth person in France since the Second World War to be cleared at the end of such a procedure.

Since his release from prison in 2008, Marc Machin has accumulated convictions, about fifteen in total, which have earned him for some to be reincarcerated.