The Problem With Leniency
France’s early release of Bernard Cantat sends the wrong message.
Theodore Dalrymple
6 November 2007
In 2003, the most famous rock singer in France,
Bernard [Bertrand] Cantat, savagely beat to death his then girlfriend, actress
Marie Trintignant, in a hotel room in Vilnius, Lithuania. Trintignant was on
location, playing Colette in a film of the writer’s life; Cantat, already
inclined to excessive jealousy, was drunk and under the influence of pot. He
inflicted fatal injuries on her before slipping into an intoxicated slumber
himself, eventually waking up and denying responsibility for what had happened.
The forensic pathologist who conducted the postmortem on Trintignant said that
he had never seen anything like her injuries.
A Lithuanian court sentenced Cantat to eight
years’ imprisonment. He soon found himself transferred to France and has
recently been released on probation by a French court after serving four years
of his sentence. The family of the deceased, prominent in the acting world,
objected strongly to what they considered Cantat’s premature release. Four
years in prison did not seem to them sufficient punishment for such a brutal
murder.
Before Cantat committed his crime, French youth
saw him as a moral hero. He was a powerful propagandist for every political
cliché known to the pop-music and show-business intelligentsia. He excoriated
Israel, but saw no ethical dilemma in appearing in Assad’s Syria, supposedly in
support of the Palestinians. He publicly insulted the head of the company that
had made him a millionaire. What further evidence of sanctity was required?
His crime caused shock and some disarray. A few
partisans of the victim purportedly sent him threats, while some of Cantat’s
supporters have viewed his deed and subsequent repentance as proof of the
tragic depth of his character. At any rate, news of the crime did not do his
record sales any harm.
In setting him provisionally at liberty, the
French court said that it was treating Cantat no differently from others who
had committed similar acts (rumors had it that his wealth and celebrity had
secured him special treatment). Cantat had shown serious and sincere remorse,
promising to continue in psychotherapy even after his release. He had also
promised not to refer to his crime in public pronouncements, or to profit from
it in any way.
Yet his comparatively early release has given
rise to public anxiety, and even outrage. Women’s groups have protested that
his brief sentence is an insufficient deterrent to those violent and jealous
men who, they claim, kill a woman in France every three days. It is a matter
for debate, however, whether someone like Cantat would have behaved differently
had he known he would go to prison for six, eight, or ten years, instead of
only four. Perhaps in such circumstances, no deterrent, up to and including the
death penalty, or life imprisonment without possibility of release, would have
exerted such an effect—if this is so (though personally I rather doubt it),
then insufficient deterrence would not be an argument against his release.
There are, however, other grounds for finding
Cantat’s sentence unduly lenient. They have nothing to do with the quality of
his remorse, which is likely entirely genuine; nor with the likelihood that he
will commit a similar offense in the future—I would be surprised if Bertrand
Cantat ever killed again. Rather, they have to do with the effect on the whole
sentencing system.
If the state punishes a crime as serious and
brutal as Cantat’s—and his intoxication, remember, was an aggravating and not a
mitigating circumstance—with only four years in prison, how can the state
repress other, less serious, but much more frequent and therefore socially
destructive crimes, with any appropriate degree of severity? If severity of
sentence ought to bear a relation to the heinousness of the crime committed,
criminals sentenced to one or two years in prison for much less serious crimes
could, perhaps not unreasonably, consider themselves victims of injustice. And
such a thought is not conducive to honest self-examination, to say the least.
Leniency for the few, most serious crimes, then,
entails leniency for the less serious but more numerous crimes that envenom and
brutalize the lives of the least privileged and most vulnerable members of
Western societies. Punishment is not psychotherapy; it would not have been
unjust to sentence Cantat to 20 years or longer in prison. Such a term would
have made the repression of other crimes much easier. A mere four years makes
it almost impossible.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a
contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at
the Manhattan Institute. His most recent book is In Praise of
Prejudice: The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas.