Paedophile surgeon's sentence leaves victims appalled

The victims of prolific French paedophile Joel Le Scouarnec have expressed their dismay that the former surgeon's 20-year prison sentence does not include preventive detention - meaning he could be released from jail in the early 2030s.

The 74-year-old was found guilty on Tuesday of sexually abusing hundreds of people, most of them underage patients of his, over decades.

Over the course of the trial he had confessed to committing 111 rapes crimes and 188 sexual assaults, and was sentenced to the maximum of 20 years in jail.

Prosecutors - who dubbed Le Scouarnec "a devil in a white coat" - had asked the court to take the extremely rare provision to hold him in a centre for treatment and supervision even after release, called preventative detention.

But the judge rejected this demand, arguing Le Scouarnec's age and his "desire to make amends" had been taken into account.

Le Scouarnec will have to serve two-thirds of his sentence before being eligible for parole.

But because he has already served seven years due to a previous conviction for the rape and sexual assault of four children, he may be eligible for parole by 2032.

His lawyer, Maxime Tessier, pointed out that saying Le Scouarnec could be released then was "inaccurate", as parole is not tantamout a release.

But his victims - many of whom assiduously attended the three-month-long trial in Vannes, northern France - are lamenting the sentence.

"For a robbery you risk 30 years. But the punishment for hundreds of child rapes is lighter?" one victim told Le Monde.

The president of a child advocacy group, Solène Podevin Favre, said that she might have expected the verdict "to be less lenient" and to include a post-sentence preventative detention.

"It's the maximum sentence, certainly," she said. "But it's the least we could have hoped for. Yet in six years, he could potentially be released. It's staggering."

Marie Grimaud, one of the lawyers representing the victims, told reporters that while she "intellectually" understood the verdict, "symbolically" she could not.

Another lawyer, Francesca Satta, said that she felt 20 years was too short a time given the number of victims in the case.

"It is time for the law to change so we can have more appropriate sentences," she argued.

But in her judgement read out to the court, Judge Aude Burési said that, while the court had "heard perfectly the demands from the plaintiffs that Le Scouarnec should never be released from jail, it would be demagogic and fanciful to let them believe that would be possible".

"In fact," she added, "the rule of law does not allow for that to happen."

One of Le Scouarnec's victims, Amélie Lévêque, said the verdict had "shocked" her and that she would have liked preventative detention to be imposed. "How many victims would it take? A thousand?"

She argued that French law needed to change and allow for harsher sentences to take into account the serial nature of crimes.

Similar complaints were raised in the aftermath of the Pelicot trial last December, in which Dominique Pelicot was found guilty of drugging and raping his wife, Gisèle, and recruited dozens of men to abuse her over almost a decade.

Pelicot, too, was sentenced to 20 years - the maximum sentence for rape in French law - with the obligation to serve a minimum of two-thirds in jail.

His case, however, will have to be re-examined at the end of the prison sentence before the question of preventative detention can be explored.

In France, sentences are not served consecutively. Public prosecutor Stéphane Kellenberger noted last week that had Le Scouarnec been on trial in the US - where people serve one prison sentence after another - he may have faced a sentence of over 4,000 years.

But Cécile de Oliveira, one of the victims' lawyers, praised the sentence, which she said had been "finely tailored" to Le Scouarnec's "psychiatric condition".

She agreed with the court's decision not to impose preventative detention on the former surgeon, adding: "It needs to remain an entirely exceptional punishment."

After the verdict was read out, victims, journalists and lawyers mingled outside the courthouse in Vannes. Many of the civil parties and their relatives, angered by the verdict, brought their frustration to the media.

"All that I ask for is that this man cannot offend again," the mother of a victim told French outlets.

"If this kind of behaviour needs to entail a life sentence, so be it."