Grenoble: a psychiatrist tried after the murder committed by his patient

It was in 2008. In the streets of Grenoble, a 26-year-old student is stabbed to death by a schizophrenic patient. The man is interned at the psychiatric hospital of Saint-Egrève (Isère). Although he should not have left the premises of the establishment, he was nevertheless authorized to go out without supervision in the hospital grounds, which he was able to leave without difficulty, before going to the hospital. street, about ten kilometers away, and to commit his act.

In 2011, the patient was tried and declared criminally irresponsible, before being placed in a unit for difficult patients. He has been hospitalized since the end of the 1970s, subject to hallucinations and morbid impulses. He has already been the author of several stabbings in his past. Today, he is 56 years old.

Responsibilities

Eight years later, the facts return to justice, with a burning question: can we impute a form of responsibility to the hospital and to the medical team, which would not have deployed sufficient surveillance on their patient? The family of the deceased student is now turning to the courts to resolve this issue.

This is the first time in France that a practicing hospital psychiatrist has been criminally prosecuted. The trial which opens this Tuesday before the Grenoble Criminal Court is unprecedented in this regard.
The maximum penalty is five years imprisonment, “but that will not go beyond the suspension,” said the lawyer for the family of the victim, quoted by AFP.

“We have no hatred; we do not wish anyone in prison but we are fighting so that it does not happen again, ”the family said. For his part, Me Jean-Yves Balestas, lawyer for the prosecuted psychiatrist, regretted that the family wanted to “brand a doctor with a hot iron”, who has ceased to practice since the tragedy. “I sympathize with their pain, of course, but the compensation can only come from an administrative judge,” he said.