Outreau case information

The Outreau case refers to a criminal case of pedophilia which took place between 1997 and 2000 in Outreau (a French commune) in northern France and a partial judicial error which led to provisional detentions between 2001 and 2004. Following alerts launched by social services within the Delay family, a long investigation seemed to reveal an extensive pedophile network: around forty adults had been accused and around fifty children were potentially victims.

The trial took place in May–July 2004 before the Cour d'assises, a criminal trial court, of the commune Pas-de-Calais (Saint-Omer) where 12 children were recognized victims of rape, sexual assault, corruption of minors and pimping. 10 of the 17 accused adults were sentenced to prison. The appeal trial at the Paris Court of Appeal took place in November 2005, where six of the ten accused were acquitted and four having not appealed. The case thus resulted in four final convictions of the two couples, as well as the acquittal of thirteen of the seventeen accused (some of whom were parents of children recognized as victims), several of whom had been held in prison for 1 to 3 years.

The alleged perpetrators in the trial were Mariyam Badaoui and her husband Thierry Delay; their neigbors Aurèlie Grenon and her partner David Delpanque; François Mourmand; David Brunet and his partner Karine Duchochois; Thierry Dausque; a baker named Roselyne Godard the baker and her husband Christian Godard; a priest named Dominique Wiel; a court bailiff named Alain Marécaux and his wife Odile Polèvche; a taxi driver named Pierre Martel; and a laboror named Daniel Legrand Sr. and his 20-year-old son Daniel Legrand Jr.

The lawyers present on the case were Frank Breton, representing Odile Polèvche, and Hubert Delarue, representing Alain Marécaux.

The acquitted received apologies from President Jacques Chirac and were compensated for their imprisonment. One of the accused, François Mourmand, who had been accused of having murdered a child, died due to an overdose after 17 months in pre-trial detention. A parliamentary commission of inquiry took place in 2005 to analyze the causes of the dysfunctions of justice in the case. The commission as well as other reports (IGSJ in 2006 and IGAS in 2007) did not, however, result in real sanctions, as no serious misconduct was accused of those involved in the matter.

The theme of the case, the high number of children recognized as victims, the potential murder of a child, as well as the number of adults indicted and kept in pre-trial detention made this case a national headline and gave rise to strong public criticism. The particularities of the trials of the Outreau affair made it a sensitive and controversial subject, while the words of the child victims have been misrepresented and not all those acquitted would be innocent. The Outreau affair caused distrust among young victims in France, with a 40% drop in child sexual assault convictions in the decade following the acquittal on appeal.^[1]