France: Outreau — mass acquittals, a recanting accuser, and a parliamentary inquiry into the prosecution itself
Record class
Separate register
Evidence status
Official finding
Authority role
French investigating magistracy, subsequently examined by a parliamentary commission
Organization
No organization assigned
Spiritual nexus
Recorded as a miscarriage-of-justice case rather than an authority-abuse case: the harm documented here was done to the wrongly accused by the prosecution itself.
- Institutional obedience or isolation
Evidence structure
Proceedings
2005-11-01 · convictions, then mass acquittals on appeal, then a parliamentary inquiry into the prosecution
Cour d'assises de Saint-Omer (2004); Cour d'assises d'appel, Paris (2005); French National Assembly commission of inquiry (2006). Of seventeen defendants tried at Saint-Omer in 2004, ten were convicted, Thierry Delay receiving twenty years. On appeal in Paris in November 2005 six of those convicted were acquitted after the principal accuser, Myriam Badaoui, recanted in open court and stated the six had not done anything; four convictions that were not appealed stood. A National Assembly commission of inquiry sat from January to April 2006, hearing more than two hundred witnesses over some two hundred hours. French child sexual-assault conviction rates fell markedly in the following decade.
Appellate history
2005-11 · undefined
undefined
Documented coercion mechanisms
- accusations that expanded through suggestive questioning and a principal accuser who later recanted in open court
Primary record
Sources
- reference index case chronology The Outreau case — trial, appeal and parliamentary inquiry chronology.
Case chronology covering the convictions, the appellate acquittals and the National Assembly inquiry.
Related record
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