The agents have been sentenced to 15 months in prison with a suspended sentence for involuntary manslaughter by performing two strangleholds on the individual to reduce it
The Paris Criminal Court on Tuesday sentenced three French police officers to 15 months in prison with probation for involuntary manslaughter following the death of Amadou Koumé in 2015 by “slow mechanical asphyxiation” during a violent arrest. The arresting officers put him in two chokeholds to reduce him.
While the sentence is light, “of course, hearing the word guilty is a satisfaction in a case like this,” Eddy Arneton, the family’s lawyer, said in statements to the French press after he learned of the verdict. Convicted police officers have ten days to appeal.
Seven years ago, Amadou Koumé, a 33-year-old family man of Senegalese descent, suffered a bout of dementia in a bar in Paris. The person in charge of the property warned the security forces, as the person had consumed cocaine, did not speak coherently, was aggressive and scared the customers.
The first officers to arrive at the bar were unable to restrain Koumé, who was six feet tall and weighed 107 kilograms. Other police reinforcements arrived. They violently arrested him. They put him in two chokeholds to make him smaller and kept him on the floor on his stomach with his hands cuffed behind his back for more than six minutes. Koumé died on the night of March 5-6, 2015 at the police station to which he was transferred after his arrest.
According to the coroner who performed the autopsy, Koumé died of “severe pulmonary edema, resulting from the association of mechanical asphyxiation due to cervical and laryngeal trauma and cocaine intoxication.”
Haby Koumé, the sister of the deceased, explained in statements to the France 3 network that the police initially only told them that Amadou had died after suffering “uncomfortably”. Haby considered the conviction of the three police officers “a victory” and that “the truth” of what happened that night is finally known.
Amadou Koumé became one of the symbols of police brutality in France after his death, along with Adama Traoré, a 24-year-old man of Malian descent who died in 2016 after being detained by gendarmes, who released a ventral tackle. French police officially stopped using the controversial choke hold to immobilize detainees in July 2021 and replaced it with other, less violent techniques.
Source: La Verdad
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