Le doute profite à l’accusé

Le doute profite à l’accusé (In dubio pro reo) is the principle that doubt in a criminal case should benefit the accused. In the Farel case, it is more than a procedural formula: it shapes the defense’s appeal to the jurors, while the prosecution and evidence expose how difficult it can be to separate uncertainty about what happened from the question of how a complainant should be heard.

Meaning and Application

At Alexandre Farel’s trial, the defense asks the jurors to focus on the acts charged and the evidence before them, rather than treat the social urgency surrounding sexual violence as proof of guilt. Maître Célérier argues that the case retains areas of uncertainty and that a conviction based on unresolved doubt would violate the jurors’ oath. He urges them to imagine the consequences of imprisonment and insists that the doubt should benefit Farel, who has consistently denied rape.

The argument does not claim that an acquittal would establish that Mila Wizman consented. Célérier makes the distinction explicit: an acquittal on a rape charge would not itself prove consent. The principle concerns the threshold for a criminal conviction, not a definitive account of the encounter or a verdict on the complainant’s suffering.

The Evidence and Its Uncertainties

The case passes through distinct stages of evidentiary assessment. When police arrest Farel, investigators explain that a complaint, repeated interviews, and forensic examinations can lead to custody when material evidence, doubt, or suspicion warrants further inquiry. At the initial stage, Farel denies knowing what the accusation concerns; later, he acknowledges sexual contact while maintaining that it was consensual.

At trial, the investigating officer recounts that Wizman arrived at a police station at 8:32 a.m. with her mother, crying and appearing deeply shocked. She described an assault in a refuse room; police arranged medical examinations and searched the location and Farel’s parents’ apartment. Investigators found the yellow underwear Wizman had described, and she identified Farel in a one-way-mirror procedure. DNA established that sexual intercourse had occurred, but experts disagreed about whether it was coercive. Toxicology showed that Wizman had consumed alcohol and cannabis and that Farel had also used cocaine.

Other testimony likewise points in more than one direction without resolving the central question. The investigating officer said nothing had led police to doubt Wizman’s sincerity. The defense questioned inconsistencies, including whether a knife had been present, while the examining doctor confirmed panic and injuries that could be consistent with forced intercourse. The evidence establishes sexual contact and documents competing indicators; it does not remove the dispute over consent and coercion.

Defense, Prosecution, and the Complainant

The trial makes the principle a matter of advocacy as well as law. Earlier, when Claire Farel says she sees no reason her son would lie, an advocate responds that people may lie from shame or fear, but that anyone accused has the right to a defense. The complainant, the advocate adds, is not the defendant’s enemy; the immediate goal is to keep Alexandre out of prison. The formulation places the right to defend the accused beside a warning against turning the complainant into an adversary.

In closing, the prosecutor describes the difficulty not as whether intercourse occurred, but as how to understand Farel’s character and the passage to the alleged crime. The prosecutor presents him as both vulnerable and attentive and capable of being contemptuous, violent, possessive, and jealous, and calls the alleged assault opportunistic. The jurors are asked to consider both the complainant’s experience and Farel’s prospects for reintegration. Wizman, visibly unsettled by what she hears, turns toward her lawyers, unsure why the prosecutor seems to have shifted toward the other side.

Célérier counters that the accusation has appealed to emotion and public causes rather than supplied proof of what happened. He invokes social class, shame, the Weinstein case, and the MeToo movement as subjects that, in his view, risk displacing the case-specific evidence. His plea therefore frames the doubt principle as a safeguard against public pressure, while the prosecution’s account frames the same uncertainty against the complainant’s experience and the surrounding evidence.

Limits and Significance

The novel presents the rule as necessary but not as a device that resolves every kind of truth. Célérier says that there are not one but two truths and that the court must nevertheless reach a judicial truth. The distinction acknowledges that a criminal judgment must be made even when the participants’ accounts remain opposed and the available evidence does not settle every question.

The principle’s most consequential limit is also stated in the defense’s own closing appeal: acquittal for rape does not entail consent. That distinction prevents the legal result from being treated as a complete account of what Wizman experienced. By setting a demand for proof beside the complainant’s testimony, forensic findings, uncertainty about coercion, and the risk of imprisonment, the case makes the principle both a protection against wrongful conviction and a point of conflict over what a court can establish.