Psychological assessments presented Jubillar as a feckless character with a rough childhood, who smoked marijuana every day, had difficulty holding down a job and thought of little but his personal gratification.<\/p>\n
He was said to have shown little concern over the disappearance of Delphine \u2013 drawing money from her bank account a short time later, for example.<\/p>\n
And there was crucial evidence from C\u00e9dric Jubillar’s mother, who recalled him telling her when he first heard that Delphine wanted a divorce: “I’ve had enough. I’m going to kill her and bury her, and they’ll never find her.”<\/p>\n
Jubillar’s defence lawyer Emmanuelle Franck said none of this amounted to more than speculation \u2013 and that the accused’s habits and attitudes could not be taken as signs of criminal responsibility.<\/p>\n
“Courts do not convict bad characters. They convict the guilty,” she said.<\/p>\n
According to the defence, there were alternative explanations for all the circumstantial clues. They said witnesses had been coached by investigators, in order to corroborate the theory of guilt.<\/p>\n
They argued that in any normal crime of passion, there were tell-tale signs left at the scene \u2013 blood, or evidence of a clean-up. But all this was absent from the Jubillar home.<\/p>\n
His lawyers said that details told in court of C\u00e9dric Jubillar’s behaviour were all irrelevant: his use of pornography, a pair of panda pyjamas with ears and tail that he was wearing when police came, and making his son Louis sit on Lego bricks as a punishment.<\/p>\n
“Either [C\u00e9dric] is a criminal genius, or he is a bit of an idiot \u2013 you have got to decide,” said Emmanuelle Franck.<\/p>\n
The defence offered no alternative explanation for Delphine’s disappearance.<\/p>\n
Convictions for murder without a body are rare because of the difficulty of proving the existence of a crime. But they do happen, with jurisdictions in many countries concluding that circumstantial evidence alone can constitute proof.<\/p>\n
For a guilty verdict in France, jurors need to have an “intimate conviction” that a crime has been committed \u2013 a concept that is left vague in law. If more than two of the nine jurors dissent, then the accused is found not guilty.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Psychological assessments presented Jubillar as a feckless character with a rough childhood, who smoked marijuana every day, had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":206980,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-206979","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206979","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206979"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206979\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206980"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206979"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206979"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206979"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}