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French cannibal prisoner ‘fried cellmate’s lungs’

By Agence France-Presse
Tuesday, June 22, 2010 8:56 EST
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ROUEN, France — A prisoner who killed his cellmate and devoured his lung with fried onions put France’s troubled prison system under critical new scrutiny Tuesday.

Thirty-nine-year-old Nicolas Cocaign is on trial for the murder of Thierry Baudry, whom he punched, stabbed with a pair of scissors and suffocated with a rubbish bag before cutting him open with a razor blade.

After removing a rib, Cocaign pulled out a lung, which he mistook for his victim’s heart, ate part of it raw and then fried the rest of it with onions on a makeshift stove in his cell, prosecutors say.

The court will hear findings from a report however into a string of “failures” at the jail in the northwestern city of Rouen where Cocaign was at the time of the cannibal killing in January 2007.

On the first day of the trial, Cocaign testified that authorities ignored his appeals for psychological help even though he had a long history of mental illness.

“No one was listening to me,” the bearded and heavily tattooed detainee told the court. “I made several appeals for help, saying I was a man capable of being dangerous. I took action, and then they took me seriously.”

The prison director, Yves Bidet, will take the witness stand on Tuesday after a coroner confirmed the circumstances of Baudry’s death by multiple stab wounds and strangulation.

“Everything that Nicolas Cocaign said has been confirmed by our observations and the autopsy,” said chief coroner Pierre Bohers.

The Baudry family lawyer suggested that conditions at the Rouen jail were also to blame for the gruesome murder.

Cocaign allegedly committed the crime following a dispute with Baudry whom he accused of plugging up the toilet with rolls of paper.

Three men shared the small cell where the murder took place and severe overcrowding has been regularly cited as a problem in French jails.

“How was it bearable for three people to share a cell of 11 square metres?” said lawyer Etienne Noel, representing the Baudry family.

The “cannibal” trial opened a week after a separate tribunal ruled in favour of 38 inmates and former inmates who complained of degrading conditions at the Rouen jail, which opened in 1864.

The administrative court ordered the French state to pay compensation of between 350 and 17,500 euros (430 to 21,500 dollars) to the plaintiffs after finding that most of the cells did not have proper sanitation nor ventilation.

With one of the highest suicide rates in Europe, French prisons are also regularly criticised by the Strasbourg-based European court of rights for failing to provide basic needs.

Mental health experts are to testify during the trial this week as to whether Cocaign was sufficiently sane to face criminal charge for his acts. A verdict is expected on Thursday.

Born in 1971, Cocaign was abandoned by his 21-year-old homeless mother and cared for by the state until he was adopted aged three. From the age of six he was already under the care of a psychologist.

Reports from his childhood suggest he had difficulty telling right from wrong and his mental difficulties worsened when he was allegedly raped, aged 13. After this he developed “violent sexual compulsions”.

He was convicted of drug possession when he was 22 and later hospitalised on several occasions with mental illness. He complained to the court that he was not given drug treatment after release, despite asking for it.

“My compulsions were still there, so …” he said.

Cocaign was serving time for several rape convictions and other violent offences.

Agence France-Presse
Agence France-Presse
AFP journalists cover wars, conflicts, politics, science, health, the environment, technology, fashion, entertainment, the offbeat, sports and a whole lot more in text, photographs, video, graphics and online.
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  • rextrek1

    ewww, ewwwwwww.yuck, and ewwwwww…this man is USELESS..NO good to society and NEVER will be rehabilitated…time to end it for him.

  • MagnusTheDestroyer

    You can be the executioner.

  • Pete Bogs

    Are prisoners generally given access to a burner unit and oil, which they could presumably throw in a guard's face? How did he get to cook the guy?

  • ReebReeb

    Scary. Dude just looks outright crazy!

  • NicholasBByrd

    Sign me up chummy. Actually I think this guy could be a great asset to society, let him kill all the death row inmates, cook them up really nice, we can them, and send them to starving nations around the world. What's the current worldwide death row population?

  • Big Alien Head

    God bless the welfare recipients and lazy, shiftless people of the world who don't have the energy or vitality to spend their time on these kinds of hobbies. A sedentary lifestyle, although not ideal, proves to be a lot safer and saner than this kind of enthusiasm and drive.

  • MagnusTheDestroyer

    Chummy?

  • iRead

    He'd make a great celly for anyone of the Bush misadministration.

    Marion Barry…not so much.

  • pist

    what a mess this guy is a disaster an utter failure as a human

    and as bad as he is i can see how he got that way france fucked him up since he was born

    i thought france was civilized looks like i was wrong

  • Big Alien Head

    Not as classy and aristocratic as an exclusive club of wealthy politicians gathering around the corpse of their dead fraternity brother. We still hate the French though, don't we?

  • Stina

    What makes you think they're any less civilized than the rest of the western world? You can look at MANY countries and see how horribly the system fails the mentally ill. Some people are truly sick and need to be treated not imprisoned. This man's repeated pleas for mental help and the inaction to those requests are directly to blame for Baudry's death.

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  • bob

    why do they let things like this live? Put a bullet in the head and take all the money that would have been spent on this waste of carbon on children to help them become healthy productive members of society.

  • Big Alien Head

    Do all “healthy productive members of society” say things like “put a bullet in the head?” At what age does father bob teach a young child, maybe 5 or 6 years old, funded by state money saved from prisons, “What we do to cannibals is put a bullet in their head?” Then from an early age, the child will know right from wrong, and never make grave moral errors in judgment.

  • pist

    i didnt say less i said i was disappointed because they arent more like i expected and wanted them to be

  • pist

    yeah treat the symptoms ignore the cause great strategy moron

  • Hooker

    Lung with fried onions?…I guess that's not exactly a five star prison.

  • Big Alien Head

    Quick elucidation on “mental illness…” The killer in this case is “mentally ill…” A person who is around the killer, knows him, and has a fear that he will be his victim is also “mentally ill.” The mental health system would likely give both of these people the same diagnosis, the same medication, and put them on the same “course of treatment.” There's your failed system.

  • howie bledsoe

    What a psychopath. Everybody knows that aside from the sinuses and entrails, lungs are the least savory part of the entire human body.

  • Big Alien Head

    Don't play with your food.

  • who_yo_daddy_be

    Bon Appetit

  • warbad

    This is an unthinkable crime made all the worse by the perpetrator's use of onions instead of shallots.

  • warbad

    Not to mention that someone should have told Mssr. Cocaign (can you believe it?) about the fact that his pen seems to have leaked all over his face.

  • Harry Johnson

    He would make a great CIA employee. The evil One known as cheney would hire him in a minute to go to the dark side.

  • Big Alien Head

    This is a story just getting us used to the cap-and-trade “carbon tax.” Charelton Heston was right.

  • Heyitzme

    Definitely a piece of republiscum. Would fit right in with the Teabaggers and libertariCONs, who believe that we don't need no stinkin' government. Why should a guy like this have his rights restricted? The Free Markets would take care of this if the dam librulz and guvmint would not interfere.

  • Syed92

    Agree 100%, CIA does not consume even the meat they produce, rather use it as garbage and energy production

  • flapdragon

    this nigga rules

  • Atilla

    He would make a great cellmate for McChrystal.

  • 46545610056

    As convincing as your plea to our human guilt and empathy is, rextrek has a point. All of you moral naysayers' attempts at “helping” this guy has done nothing but destroy him and, considering the shoddy nature of the state systems of our world today, it's safe to say that any future attempts at intervention will likely end up in disaster for this poor bastard. It'd be more merciful to just put a bullet to his head at this point.

  • EnquiringMenus

    What're the odds he had a tossed salad with it?

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    Put any of Obama's staff in there with him. Along with Pelosi or Reid.

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