Marc Dutroux - First Arrest and Failure of The System

First Arrest and Failure of The System

In February 1986, Dutroux and Martin were arrested for abducting and raping five young girls. In April 1989, he was sentenced to thirteen and a half years in prison. Martin received a sentence of five years. Showing good behaviour in prison, Dutroux was released on parole in April 1992, having served only three years, by Justice Minister Melchior Wathelet. Upon his release the parole board received a letter from Dutroux's own mother to the prison director, in which she stressed concern that he was keeping young girls captive in his house - which was essentially ignored.

Following his release from prison, Dutroux was able to convince a psychiatrist that he was psychiatrically disabled, resulting in a government pension. He also received prescriptions of sleeping pills and sedatives, which he would later use on his victims.

Read more about this topic:  Marc Dutroux

Famous quotes containing the words arrest, failure and/or system:

    “Let me arrest thy thoughts; wonder with me,
    Why plowing, building, ruling and the rest,
    Or most of those arts, whence our lives are blest,
    By cursed Cain’s race invented be,
    And blest Seth vexed us with Astronomie.”
    —John Donne (c. 1572–1631)

    “The book borrower of real stature whom we envisage here proves himself to be an inveterate collector of books not so much by the fervor with which he guards his borrowed treasures and by the deaf ear which he turns to all reminders from the everyday world of legality as by his failure to read these books.”
    —Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)

    “For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.”
    —Walter Pater (1839–1894)