Lina Jean, mother of the only Frenchman awaiting execution in the United States, fights to avoid capital punishment for her son. On December 9, 2021, a judge ruled that Joseph Jean, who is also a US citizen, had a mental disability that limited his intellectual abilities, and that his sentence should be commuted to life in prison, according to his attorneys. .
“Get him off death row,” he pleads today from his home in Texas. “He should be gone by now.”
But the criminal court of appeals in Texas – the US state that executes the most – has yet to decide whether to approve this sentence or appeal. Thus, for nearly a year, the Frenchman has been on death row, confined 22 to 23 hours a day in a small cell in a high-security prison.
“He’s fine” and “he reads a lot”, although he says he suffers from the constant noise of the prison, says Lina Jean, a 79-year-old Guadeloupean. “I tell him to keep hope alive, not to give up.”
Convicted of a double murder
Convicted multiple times for drug possession and robbery. Joseph Jean, 50, received the death penalty in 2011 for a double murder committed in Baytown, near Houston, on April 11, 2010.
That night, he had broken into his ex-girlfriend’s house. She was away, but her daughter was at home with a cousin. Joseph Jean allegedly killed the two girls, ages 16 and 17, with a baseball bat, before setting the apartment on fire and fleeing.
In the United States, a person with a mental disability that restricts his or her intellectual abilities cannot be sentenced to death, according to a 2002 Supreme Court ruling. personal,” the judge wrote.
However, states are free to define the limits of the definition of this disability.
French nationality requested in prison
Lina Jean would like to one day prove her son’s innocence. Meanwhile, she makes no secret of her impatience at the thought of being able to “touch him, take him in her arms” once she leaves death row. She counts the days, and she is annoyed by the delays in justice: “They take their time!”
It was in prison, and after his death sentence, that Joseph Jean had applied for French nationality, on the advice of his lawyers. Lina Jean, born in Guadeloupe, had settled in the US Virgin Islands in the early 1970s with her husband, also French. Joseph Jean was born there, thus obtaining American citizenship.
According to a French diplomatic source, the French authorities are following Joseph Jean’s situation and are asking for his sentence to be commuted.
Source: BFM TV
