France - a miscarriage of justice?

Sometimes a country's legal system doesn't get it right. And that might well be the situation if a case currently making the headlines here in France is to be believed.

Has an innocent man been sitting in a French prison for the past six years for a crime that never happened?

A story covered in Monday evening's prime time news on TF1 and in several of the national daily newspapers, highlighted the case of 47-year-old Loïc Sécher, who has been behind bars perhaps for exactly that reason.

Wind back to 2000, when in November of that year police in the village of La Chapelle-Saint-Sauveur in Loire-Atlantique in western France, arrested Sécher, a farm labourer, and took him in for questioning following allegations made by a 13-year-old girl that he had sexually molested and raped her on three separate occasions.

She was the daughter of friends.

He proclaimed his innocence, but was later charged, and in December 2003 a court found him guilty and sentenced him to 16 years in prison.

An appeal a year later upheld that ruling and although Sécher has always maintained his innocence his cause seemed a lost one until April this year.

That was when the girl, now 22 years old, sent France's Chief Prosecutor a letter in which she said Sécher was "innocent and she could no longer live with the knowledge that he was in prison."

Sécher's defence team put in a request to France's court of cassation (the main court of "last resort" in France) that the case be re-examined, their client released and the original ruling overturned.

Yvon Chotard, one Sécher's lawyers, said that it had taken a lot of courage for the woman to retract her original claims and that at the time the allegations were made there had been no real investigation into the background of a girl who even her own lawyers admitted was "psychologically fragile."

"Eight years ago she had been the victim of school bullying by a trio of boys older than her," he is quoted as saying in Le Figaro.

In addition, at the time of his trial there had reportedly been no DNA evidence to prove that Sécher had assaulted the girl, and indeed a medical examination was unable to prove that a rape had taken place.

On Monday the court of cassation met behind closed doors to consider Sécher's case, but it did not reach the decision Chotard or his client had been hoping for. Instead it delayed making a final ruling until mid October.

"He (Sécher) is a victim of a miscarriage of justice," said Chotard after the hearing. "Our hope now is that the French justice system will release someone who has been claimed innocent by the victim."

For the moment though Sécher remains behind bars.

Even if the court decides to release him next month the process of overturning and in effect annulling the original decision could take a lot longer and would require another appeal.

Such a move has reportedly only happened six times in France since 1945.