© Anne-Christine Poujoulat/AFP
Daniele Canarelli, who had been treating Joel Gaillard for four years.
Daniele Canarelli, who had been treating Joel Gaillard for four years.
French psychiatrists' unions have reacted angrily after a doctor was found guilty of manslaughter because her patient hacked an elderly man to death.
In the first case of its kind in France, Daniele Canarelli, 58, a psychiatrist based at the Edouard-Toulouse hospital in Marseille, was sentenced to one year's suspended prison sentence as judges said she had committed the "grave error" of failing to recognise the public danger posed by Joel Gaillard, her patient of four years.
Gaillard, 43, had escaped from a hospital consultation with Canarelli in February 2004 and 20 days later he used an axe to kill the 80-year-old partner of his grandmother in Gap in the Alps region. Gaillard, who suffered from a kind of paranoid schizophrenia, had been seeing the consultant for four years and had already been forcibly committed to a secure hospital on several occasions for a series of increasingly dangerous incidents.
