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Domestic violence victim who killed her husband released from jail

Jacqueline Sauvage has been in jail since 2014

Jacqueline Sauvage and her four children suffered decades of abuse by Norbert Marot before she snapped and shot him in the back.

A French woman who killed her husband after years of abuse has had her jail sentence overturned.

 

Jacqueline Sauvage, now 69, had been brutalised by her husband for decades. When her son committed suicide in 2012, Sauvage picked up a gun a day later and shot the man who had been making hers and her family’s life a living hell.

 

She was granted a pardon two years into her 10 year sentence by French president Francois Hollande and walked free on Wednesday, after long campaigns from her daughters and other activists.

 

Her family had long maintained that she’d been brutally beaten by her husband Norbert Marot for decades, as had her son. She ended up in hospital four times. Two of her three daughters had been sexually abused.

 

“I’ve decided to grant Jacqueline Sauvage a pardon of the rest of her sentence. This pardon puts an immediate end to her detention,” the French president tweeted upon her release.

 

A number of lawmakers opposed the decision, claiming it made a mockery of the judicial process. Virginie Duval, the head of the French union of magistrates, complained that the president had acted “to please public opinion”, and said the judiciary had been within its rights to reject her earlier appeals.

 

430,000 people signed a petition demanding that she be pardoned.

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