Patrick Henry died today in Lille. Henry is famous in France because in 1977 he was sentenced to the death penalty for kidnapping and killing a 7-year-old boy. The time, however, was ripe in France back in 1977, to remove the death penalty from transalpine legislation. With him, France, in fact, decided to say enough to the death penalty and after 4 years it abolished it by law.
The turning point was the man who linked his name to the end of the extreme sentence, Robert Badinter, who became Minister of Justice when Francois Mitterrand became the first Socialist president in 1981. As promised, Badinter had the death penalty abolished that 4 years earlier he had narrowly avoided his client Patrick Henry. Henry, 64, had been free for health reasons for a month. He had had lung cancer for a year. He spent 40 years in a cell for killing little Philippe Bertrand. Due to the repugnant nature of his crime and a provocative attitude, he had public opinion against him. They wanted his death, as well as in that same 1977, in the month of June, it was the turn of Christian Ranucci, who was executed for the same crime. Two ministers from the time of Valery Giscard d'Estaing - that of the Interior, Michel Poniatowski, and that of Justice, Jean Lecanuet - were in the front row to ask for the guilty's head. On the other side, there was a host of intellectuals, journalists, politicians and religious who transformed Henry's trial into the death penalty. The speeches of the defense were concentrated against the barbarism of the death penalty, while a not indifferent part in the sensational outcome was the attitude of great dignity and discretion of the parents of the killed child, whose lawyer was also an abolitionist. Badinter's final speech remained memorable, when he addressed the jurors one by one, looking them in the eye and asking them "not to cut a living man in two". He convinced them not to reject the responsibility for a death on a possible, but unlikely, presidential pardon. When, 4 years later, Mitterrand won the elections, one of the first legal texts that the gauche passed was the abolition of the death penalty, despite 62% of the French being in favor. Having become the face of abolitionism, Henry tried in 2001 to also become a symbol of reintegration, but he did not succeed: a model prisoner, he obtained parole but the following year he was stopped in France with 10 kilos of cannabis in his car. He returned to prison, only to be released last month, now dying.