The penalty demands against the eight suspects in the Pierre Collette manslaughter case were much lower yesterday on appeal than last year before the Maastricht court. While the public prosecutor in Maastricht demanded a total of 95 years' imprisonment, the court in Den Bosch yesterday reduced the total to sixty years. The 31-year-old Pierre Collette from Liège was lured on July 28, 2004, by a group of young people from mainly Maastricht with the promise of sex from the then gay meeting place Keelbos along the (A97) to the Sint Pietersberg. The plan was to rob him of his expensive Volvo, but on the Sint Pietersberg he was completely beaten up with a baseball bat, kicked and finally stabbed with a knife. On Aug. 6, his body was found by a cousin. In the intervening period, his family desperately searched for the missing man.
The demands on appeal are more close to the sentences imposed by Maastricht court than they are to the demands in the first instance. About its changed stance in the case, the public prosecutor would only say that "prescriptive insight into the role of some of the defendants and the level of sentences" led to this, according to attorney general H. de Goende. The public prosecutor in Maastricht, which filed an appeal in July last year immediately after the court rulings, did not want to comment yesterday: "The attorney general has come to a different insight. That is possible. We have no further opinion on that," said press officer W. Smits.
The demands as filed with the court yesterday range from acquittal to 14 years. At first instance, they ranged from five to 18 years. Like the prosecutor at trial, Attorney General De Goede also deemed so-called qualified manslaughter proven: the juveniles considered their own monetary gain more important than Collette's life.
