Michelle Martin: justice and mercy - which comes first?

The Tablet

James Roberts31 August 2012,
 On the night of 28 August, Michelle Martin left her Brussels prison cell to serve the remaining 14 years of her 30-year sentence in a convent of the Poor Clare Sisters in Malonne, near the city of Namur. She had been granted conditional early release after serving 16 years in jail as the accomplice of her ex-husband, Marc Dutroux, who kidnapped and raped six girls, and murdered four of them, during the 1990s.

Martin was arrested in 1996, and finally convicted in 2004, of complicity in the starving to death of Julie Lejeune and Mélissa Russo. She failed to tell the police, who had arrested Dutroux on another offence, that the two eight-year-old girls were being held in a basement dungeon in their house.

Marc and Michelle had been jailed in the 1980s for kidnapping and raping five young girls, but they were freed early on good behaviour. This allowed them to continue not only abducting and raping girls, but to start torturing them to death.

Paul Marchal's daughter Ann was one of Dutroux's victims. 'There is only one word for this. This is simply absurd. But I will have to accept it,' he said, when he heard the decision of Belgium's highest court, the Court of Cassation. 'Concerning Martin, my fight is over and done. I lost.'

Judges at the court in Brussels had rejected two appeals against Martin's conditional release - one led by Jean-Denis Lejeune, the father of Julie Lejeune, and another by prosecutors. Mr Lejeune is to take a case to the European Court of Human Rights arguing that Dutroux's victims should be able to block early release.
'I want to scream. For me, Michelle Martin is as much responsible for the death of my daughter as Dutroux. She is more dangerous than him,' he said.

In her new home in the Clarisse convent, Martin's protection, by dozens of full-time police officers, will cost £95,000 a month, more than 30 times the cost of keeping her incarcerated. She will also be entitled to claim more than £400 a month in social security payments.In their life of prayer, the nuns have no doubt heard the endless screams and tortured pleading of the little victims of their new guest. Unfortunately the judges of the Court of Cassation were deaf to the scream and pleading of the father of Julie Lejeune. Did the nuns hear his scream, that in the name of justice for his daughter, Martin should remain in prison? And if so, how did they square that with their merciful approach to the woman responsible for the slow torturing to death of his little girl?


James Roberts is Assistant Editor (Foreign News) of The Tablet