Updated 04/20/23 at 09:06
A Texas appeals court just removed the sword of Damocles hanging over Joseph Jean. The only Frenchman currently on death row in the United States had his sentence commuted to life imprisonment on Wednesday with no possibility of parole.
He was sentenced to death in January 2011 for killing two teenage girls with a baseball bat in April 2010 in Baytown, near Houston, Texas. Her mother said she was “so happy” when the move was announced. “I’ll be able to take him in my arms, I’ll be able to touch him,” Lina Jean was touched and happy to be able to visit him more often.
A very long legal process
Back in August 2013, Joseph Jean’s lawyers challenged his sentence, saying he had a mental disability, a diagnosis incompatible with the death penalty since a 2002 Supreme Court decision in December 2021 of the validity of that diagnosis.
The Texas Court of Appeal joins them in its decision. The judges considered that the applicant had managed to demonstrate that he “met the legal and clinical criteria for a diagnosis of intellectual developmental disorder and therefore did not qualify for the death penalty”.
Joseph Jean, now 50, was born in the United States Virgin Islands to two French parents. His mother, who lives near Houston, came to Texas with five of her seven sons in 1985 to join her husband, who had found a job as a welder at a refinery, she explained in October 2022.