Sunday, January 22, 2006
Do you call this justice done??
A Frenchwoman who eluded justice for 25 years after carrying out a bank robbery in her youth has been given a two-year suspended prison sentence. Helene Castel was 21 when she and six accomplices, all comfortable middle-class families, held up a bank in Paris. One robber was shot dead and the bank manager was seriously wounded when the raid went wrong, but Castel escaped and fled to Mexico. She assumed a false identity, had a child and made a career as a physiotherapist. She was arrested by Mexican police in 2004, just days before her crime would have fallen outside France's 20-year statute of limitations. Her arrest, she said, was like a "cold shower in a heatwave". She was sentenced to life imprisonment in absentia, but last week a Parisian court accepted that she was a changed woman and imposed a suspended sentence. - quoted from The Week Issue 545
