A French police officer accused of shooting dead a teenage driver at point-blank range, in an incident that set off national unrest in 2023, will stand trial for the French equivalent of manslaughter instead of murder, a court announced on Thursday.
The victim, Nahel Merzouk, 17, was a French citizen of Algerian and Moroccan descent who lived in a hardscrabble suburb of Paris. His death, which spurred days of protests and riots across France, exacerbated longstanding complaints about the French police, who have often faced accusations of brutality against young men from ethnic minorities, especially in Paris’s impoverished suburbs.
Initial reports of the shooting in the French news media, citing anonymous police sources, said the teenager had plowed his car into two officers, leading one to shoot. Then a bystander’s video of the shooting went viral, appearing to show a very different story. The footage showed armed officers, seemingly not in immediate danger, confronting the youth through a side window of his stationary vehicle. Then the car rolled forward, and a shot rang out.
Initially, a French judge ordered that the officer accused of pulling the trigger should be tried for murder, but his lawyer appealed. An appeals court ruled on Thursday that the officer, identified by prosecutors only as Florian M. in accordance with French legal custom, should be tried on a lesser charge of “intentional violence resulting in death without the intent to kill” — the French equivalent for manslaughter.
In its reasoning, the appeal judges ruled that it had not been established that the police officer, “at the time of the shooting, intended to take the driver’s life.”
Frank Berton, the lawyer for Mr. Merzouk’s mother, Mounia, said she was shocked the court had made a ruling on the police officer’s intention without conducting a trial.
“She’s right about that,” Mr. Berton said in a phone interview. “There’s a real problem here.”
The maximum sentence for murder in France is 30 years, while for manslaughter it is 15.
The officer, who was initially imprisoned, now works an administrative job with the police, without a gun, said his lawyer Laurent-Franck Liénard.
In France, it is rare for a police officer to face criminal charges for excessive use of force during an arrest, even when it leads to death. The issue has been raised by international human rights groups for decades. In the few cases sent to criminal courts, often many years later, convictions are infrequent and sentences are usually short.
No date has been set for the trial, Mr. Liénard said.
Catherine Porter is an international reporter for The Times, covering France. She is based in Paris.
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