The public prosecutor in Valence has formally contested the decision by investigating judges to retain an aggravating circumstance of racism in the 2023 murder of 16-year-old Thomas Perotto at a village ball in Crépol, in the Drôme department, southeast France.
In a complementary final submission dated August 17, the prosecutor’s office maintained that the alleged racist motivation remains insufficiently established in law and in fact.
It argued that the testimonies referring to anti-white or anti-French remarks are a small minority (around 16 out of more than 200 statements), sometimes imprecise, variable or contradictory, and cannot be reliably attributed to specific suspects.
The submission adds that many of those questioned heard no racist language at all and that only one of the men under investigation reported such remarks during his interrogation, according to CNews, which has seen the document.
The prosecutor’s office has at the same time asked the judges to retain a different aggravating circumstance, that of concomitance, on the grounds that two other people at the ball were the targets of attempted murder in the same sequence of violence. Franceinfo reported that this would not alter the maximum sentence the accused face.
This position reaffirms the stance taken by Valence public prosecutor Laurent de Caigny in his June 11 submissions, in which he requested the referral of 11 of the 14 defendants to the juvenile assize court on charges of murder and attempted murder while rejecting both the organised-gang and racist aggravating circumstances.
That 290-page document rested on the notion of a single scene of violence, which spreads criminal responsibility across everyone who took part, and asked that proceedings be dropped against two of the 14.
By contrast, on July 23 the two investigating judges issued a second notice of closure of the investigation in which they formally retained the aggravating circumstance.
They stated that the facts had been committed by reason of the victims’ membership of “a supposed race, ethnicity, nation or religion, in this case the white race and the French nation”.
The decision was based on a number of witness statements reporting hostile remarks, including phrases such as “we are here to stab whites”.
The judges acted on observations from civil parties, among them a 30-page memorandum filed by Jérôme Triomphe for the Alliance générale contre le racisme et pour le respect de l’identité française et chrétienne (AGRIF), which litigates against what it calls anti-French and anti-Christian racism.
Thomas was fatally stabbed during the village winter ball on November 19, 2023. He had done nothing to provoke the violence, but young men from the migrant-populated suburbs of Romans-sur-Isère came armed with knives to start a fight.
In a statement issued in November 2023, the prosecutor’s office said nine of the 104 witnesses and victims heard at that stage had reported remarks hostile to white people.
The case was initially widely described in much of the French media as a rixe, a brawl or clash between groups, a framing that critics argued obscured the wider context of the attack, including the backgrounds of the suspects and reports of racist insults directed at the victims.
It became a political flashpoint within days, feeding a wider French argument over immigration, juvenile crime and the readiness of the courts to name a racial motive.
Fourteen young men, most of them from the La Monnaie neighbourhood in nearby Romans-sur-Isère, remain under formal investigation for the fatal stabbing of Perotto and related attacks during the night of November 18-19, 2023.
None has admitted delivering the fatal blow, and a ten-day virtual reconstruction of the attack failed to establish who struck it.
The judges’ inclusion of the racism aggravating circumstance, if ultimately upheld, would raise the maximum penalty from 30 years’ imprisonment to life. De Caigny’s decision in June to drop the organised-gang classification had already brought that ceiling down from life to 30 years.
“The victims do not understand that this aggravating circumstance is dismissed by the prosecution. This issue must be considered to the end and debated at trial,” said Lara Fatimi, a lawyer for the association Léa (Fight for Equality in Anti-Racism), speaking to Le Monde.
Denis Dreyfus, who represents about forty civil parties, hopes that this circumstance will be confirmed. “It would be hard to understand that in a few weeks we say everything and its opposite,” he told AFP.
Jérôme Triomphe, another lawyer for the victims, told CNews that there was “a denial of reality” regarding anti-white racism and was highly critical of the prosecution.
The defence has consistently disputed any racial motive.
The investigating judges will now decide whether to retain the circumstance in their final order of indictment. A trial could open in the autumn of 2027, ICI Drôme Ardèche reported.
Critics on the right frequently argue that French prosecutors and courts have shown far greater readiness to retain the aggravating circumstance of racism when the victims are of immigrant background or non-European origin, often on the basis of insults or contextual elements that would be deemed insufficient in cases involving white French victims, where they note a blind spot.
