The crime of “road homicide” can be established after a favorable final vote in the Senate this Tuesday, July 1. Therefore, the parliamentary process is completed. After a vote of the senators, the reform made by the deputy Les Républicins Eric Pauget is now waiting for its promulgation by the President of the Republic, before its entry into force.
The debate on the crime of injuries in homicide and the road was relaunched after the accident caused by Pierre Palmade in February 2023. The actor had seriously injured three people during a violent collision when driving under the influence of narcotics and was sentenced to five years in prison, including two farms in November 2024 due to involuntary injuries.
During the last three years, it is also the fight of the leading chief Yannick Alléno and his association Antoine Allo, which bears the name of his son who died in May 2022 after being beaten by a driver who multiplied serious crimes, which was sentenced to 7 years in prison for the murder by men.
However, the use of involuntary adjective, a legal term that currently qualifies these crimes, moves the victims and their families, who often fight to accept it when they face deliberate behavior, such as conduct under the influence of drugs or without a license.
From a simple accident to a criminal act
“It is the culmination of hard work against injustice,” said Yannick Alléno in a press release where he greets the adoption of this text that “will end with the archaism of our criminal law.”
“Nothing will repair the irreparable. But the law, from now on, will not wait anxiously,” said Justice Minister Gérald Darmanin, appreciating a law that “clarified that killing along the way, under the influence of alcohol, under the influence of drugs, speed or in the deliberate contempt of the rules, is not a simple accident, it is a criminal act.”
This claim was shared to the league against road violence, arguing that this “semantic change, desired by the victims, also incorporates more aggravating circumstances.”
With this crime, mortal officials of traffic accidents accompanied by at least one aggravating circumstance will be prosecuted for the homicide of the road.
Aggravating circumstances are the violation of a security measure, the state of poisoning, the consumption of narcotics and/or psychoactive substances, not to maintain a permission, a surplus of the maximum authorized speed equal to or greater than 30 km/h, the crime of flight, to use your mobile phone by hand or with the headphones, the refusal to the urban relationship.
Incurred sanctions
When a driver is guilty of one of these circumstances, he will be responsible for 7 years in prison and 100,000 euros fine, a high sentence at 10 years in prison and 150,000 euros beyond two aggravating circumstances.
These are the same penalties as those currently incurred with involuntary homicide. A point that cares, while some observers believe that the average sentences currently pronounced is 2 years in prison.
“I fear that the idea that the magistrates do not go beyond their analysis of the traffic accident as a remaining accident. They could have done so if we had changed the amount of sanctions,” said AFP Vincent Jule-Parade, specialized in defense of the victims of the road.
Several senators issued the same doubts on Tuesday during the final exam of the text, for fear of a single “symbolic” text but, nevertheless, they consent to adopt the without modifying bill to avoid prolonging the legislative process.
ELATOR Les Republicines Francis Szpiner thus judged the “imperfect” text, believing that the work should prolong, in the long term, “that drivers understand that their behavior is criminal.”
In 2024, 3,190 people died on the roads of Continental France and 233,000 were injured, including almost 16,000 serious. According to the National Interministerial Observatory for Road Safety (ONISR), two thirds of body accidents have at least one aggravating factor and three quarters of the officials, they are repeated almost frequently and more seriously than before.
Source: BFM TV
