The magistrate explained to the convict, in pre-trial detention since the facts, that he was however eligible for an adjustment of sentence because of his age.
The Assize Court of Indre-et-Loire sentenced, on Wednesday in Tours, Pierre Olivier, aged 88, to eight years in prison for the murder of his sick wife in May 2020 after 63 years of living together.
The jury did not follow in full the requisitions of the prosecution, which had claimed ten years of imprisonment against the octogenarian.
President Aude Cristau expressed the court’s desire to “recall the fundamental prohibition to take life whatever the circumstances”. The court upheld the alteration of discernment.
The magistrate explained to Pierre Olivier, in pre-trial detention since the facts, that he was however eligible for a sentence adjustment because of his age.
“You can’t issue a license to kill”
Pierre Olivier has always admitted to having killed his sick 84-year-old wife by hitting her with the butt of a rifle in their house in Francueil (Indre-et-Loire) in May 2020, a few days after the lifting of the first confinement.
“You must judge an 88-year-old man who brutally murdered his wife after 63 years of living together. This sentence is correct, but the reality is much more complex”, had launched to the jurors the general counsel Pierre Gérard.
However, “a purely symbolic sentence would mean that, when you are 88, you have the right to open your wife’s skull when she deteriorates”. “You cannot issue a license to kill,” he said, recalling that the victim had not experienced “a sweet death”
Pierre and Marcelle, childless, had met at 18 in 1952. They had settled in Touraine when they retired in 1987. According to witnesses, the couple, passionate about dance, lived a happy relationship until the brutal degradation of Marcelle’s health at the start of 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 crisis. Her autopsy showed she had Alzheimer’s disease.
“Sentenced to life”
Faced with the distress of his wife and “emptied” by the care, the former Parisian taxi driver then decided to take action, justifying his gesture by an old promise of the couple to leave together.
“We don’t want him to die in prison,” defended one of his lawyers, Me Guillaume Bardon, referring to an “exhausted” old man.
In May 2020, the accused had first tried in vain to kill his wife and himself by poisoning with carbon monoxide and then with gas. The old man then hit his wife before giving up on committing suicide, “at the end of his tether” according to his advice.
In his last words before the court, the accused said he was already “sentenced to life”: “Not a day goes by that I don’t think about my failure to leave together.”
