In common with all countries I regard as fully civilised, France executes no one these days. Even those who would happily see the return of Madame Guillotine, or are now rejoicing at the death sentences passed on the gang that raped and murdered a woman in India, would be unlikely to chop off the heads of mere jewel thieves.
But in the case of Tony, one of two young voyous who staged an armed raid on La Turquoise, a small jewellery shop in the centre of Nice, the sentence turned out to be death all the same.
The jeweller, Stephan Turk*, opened fire as the pair fled on a scooter having burst into the shop brandishing a pump-action gun, beaten him and made off with their loot. Tony - said variously to be 18, 19 and 20 - was hit in the back and fell off into the road. His accomplice got away as he lay dying but will surely be caught easily enough.
Turk was taken into custody and faces the prospect of a voluntary homicide charge, or some lesser accusation that he caused Tony's death by his actions. (Late news: he has been put under formal investigation, close to but not quite being charged with, voluntary homicide and released on bail with an electronic bracelet).
Around France,there are plenty who consider him a hero, the petit commerçant who, already the target of two raids on his shop including one only a year ago, had simply had enough.
His son, Yann, popped up on the news saying his father was trying to burst the scooter's tyres to prevent the robbers' escape and had no intention of killing or even hurting them. We'll see. It emerged later that this may have applied only to the first two of his three shots; according to the public prosecutor, he apparently now says he aimed the last at the fleeing robber believing he had raised his gun to shoot him).
And meanwhile, when I last looked, 1.5 million people had ticked to "like" a Soutien au bijoutier de Nice page at Facebook, set up to champion the 67-year-old jeweller's cause. There are suggestions of manipulation - more than 40 per cent of the "likes" came from outside France - but there is undeniably a huge groundswell of support, even if a lot of it comes from a disreputable source, the Front National.
My tick is not there. Of course, it is tempting to sympathise, to have little or no regret - even to feel, as one Facebook contributor put it, a little joy - at the death of a violent criminal who essentially brought about his own sorry end. Death, as the old British inquest verdict would have it, by misadventure.
Nice-Matin, to its credit, had an interview with the dead teenager's father, who made no defence of his son's "beaucoup de bêtises" - a somewhat mild description of armed robbery - and freely admitted the boy was a delinquent and scooter thief. But no child should die like that, he said, "shot like a pigeon".
Whatever his failings as a parent, which sound as if they may well have been considerable, he is right. There is a natural instinct to champion the cause of a hard-working, normally law-abiding man, driven by exasperation and the powerlessness of the law to defend him, to act as he did.
In the UK, too, there is resentment that police, while miraculously able to find millions of pounds to devote countless hours to the pursuit of journalists for what, in the grander scheme of things, were minor misdemeanours better dealt with by the civil courts and internal discipline, seem so impotent in tackling burglaries and crimes that actually hurt people.
But one sure way for society to descend into hellish depths of brutality and inhumanity is to give everyone carte blanche to take the notion of proper self-defence to such disproportionate levels. It would also make it far more likely that hoodlums would use the guns they carry om such escapades.
There's room galore for mitigation in the case of Stéphane Turk, but none for treating him as a hero. He shot a villain in circumstances that made him a villain too.
* He began as Stéphane Turk in French media reports but the spelling of his name as evolved, long with other details, in the ensuing coverage.
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