Seventy-five euros in compensation per day of wrongful imprisonment: that’s what, on average, our judicial system awards to the unfortunate souls it has unjustly crushed. Unless, of course, your name is Bernard Tapie or you were acquitted in the Outreau case. His story has never been told. Yet, it gives pause for thought. On July 3, 2002, based solely on the testimony of a woman who believes she recognized him, Richard Laurent was accused of rape, arrested at his home, and brutally thrown in prison. “I didn’t understand what was happening to me; it was a nightmare,” confides the 57-year-old railway worker, married and father of three. A few months later, still incarcerated, he saw a prisoner accused of pedophilia arrive in his cell, who also proclaimed his innocence. “Like mine, his investigating judge had condemned him in advance, without giving him a chance to explain himself,” he recalls.

For months, the two men supported each other before being released, acquitted, and then compensated by the state. But not on the same scale. For his 12 months and 18 days of unjustified pretrial detention at the Compiègne prison, Richard Laurent received €50,000 in 2007, or €130 in compensation per day of imprisonment. Barely enough to cover his legal fees and compensate for his lost wages… For his thirty months spent in the same cell, his fellow sufferer received nearly €600,000, proportionally four times as much. It must be said that his case was followed by the entire country: Pierre Martel was one of the thirteen acquitted in the Outreau affair.

There’s no point in beating around the bush: when the ermine robes take it upon themselves to right wrongs, they often commit even worse ones. “It’s been glaringly obvious since the Tapie affair,” fumes Roland Agret, head of the Action Justice association, himself imprisoned for murder and acquitted in the 1980s. Admittedly, the compensation paid for “moral damages” to the former owner of Olympique de Marseille in the Crédit Lyonnais-Adidas case wasn’t determined by the judicial system itself, but by an arbitration panel operating in the private sphere. But these 45 million euros still create a jarring impression: they alone represent three to four times the total compensation awarded by the courts to the 600 other victims identified each year. In a written question to the government a few months ago, UMP Senator René Vestri denounced this “flagrant disproportion” and demanded that the Ministry of Justice provide him with the details of its compensation scales. In vain: Georges Tron, who had not yet been dismissed from the government and who was representing the Minister of Justice in the Senate that day, did not even begin to provide an answer.