Martinique armed robbery verdict ignores homophobia
Martinique LGBT activist was blinded in the assault
Lonny Féréol, 28, was found guilty of complicity in an armed robbery against Brice Armien-Boudré, co-president of Martinique’s main LGBT+ advocacy organization Kap Caraïbe, that took place in October 2020 in Ducos, Martinique. The jury did not find homophobia to be a motive in the attack.
An extremely violent assault
On March 24, Féréol was sentenced to 13 years’ rigorous imprisonment by the Fort-de-France Assize Court, while the jury did not apply the aggravating circumstance of homophobia.
His accomplice, Mike Beuze, who used blows and insults in the attack that left the victim totally blind in his left eye, died in a traffic accident during the judicial investigation. It was Beuze who swung the barrel of his firearm at the victim as he attempted to fight back, swearing, “You dirty faggot, I’m going to kill you.”
The leniency of the jury’s verdict for Féréol, the only defendant on trial for the assault, came as a surprise to the victim, given the public prosecutor’s recommendation of 20 years’ rigorous imprisonment and the verbatim transcripts of the trial published in the local press.
That’s led some to question whether LGBT people can receive fair treatment from a jury, given prevailing homophobic attitudes in Martinique.
The situation echoes similar assaults in mainland France, where judges often fail to recognize the aggravating circumstance of racism when investigating cases, even when the facts are substantiated, as demonstrated by the recent investigation by our Loopsider media colleagues.
A justice system that internalizes the homophobia of Martinican society ?
Lonny Féréol’s comments on the victim during his defense were clear, and they should have caught the jurors’ attention.
“From the way he spoke, I could see that he wasn’t someone like us,” Féréol said in court.
He even revealed that his accomplice wanted to rob a victim who was “easy, who wouldn’t fight back,” according to Radio Caraïbes Internationale.
Pretending to be unaware of the sexual orientation of Brice Armien-Boudré, a well-known figure in Martinique for his commitment to the fight against homophobia, he said, “If I had known earlier that he was gay, I would never have become friends with him.”
Despite this, the jury did not recognize homophobia as an aggravating factor in the assault.
Denial of justice for victims of homophobia in overseas France
Ultimately, the verdict leaves a bitter taste in the mouth of the Kap Caraïbe association.
“We can’t contain its disappointment that the Assize Court didn’t find homophobia,” the association’s lawyer Maître Vaïté Corin, told France-Antilles.
It’s not just Martinique. Several recent cases in the French Caribbean have illustrated the difficulty of recognizing homophobic assaults for what they are in court, illustrating the limits of hate crime laws which rely on the court system and juries made up of members of the public to apply them.
In a 2021 case in French Guiana, the children’s judge of the Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni court did not accept the homophobic nature of a stabbing against this reporter, despite the evidence in the case file. The youth attacker in that case was sentenced to parole until he became an adult, while his guardian was ordered to pay the victim €500 in damages.
A few years earlier, in February 2019, a 19-year-old was tried in the Guadeloupe correctional court for having explicitly claimed responsibility for an attempted murder, on the grounds of the sexual orientation of a 50-year-old man whom he had ambushed. The victim had been stabbed 33 times on December 4, 2017 and miraculously emerged alive. The accused was only sentenced to 7 years in prison, which some considered lenient given the psychological trauma suffered by the victim.
