Marie Jeanneret was a trained nurse who worked in Geneva in the late 1860s. In the nine months before June 1868, at least six of the patients she looked after died. When a physician brought his suspicions to the authorities that summer, she was arrested, and she admitted the deaths while insisting they had been mistakes. A jury in Geneva found her guilty of murder later that year. It did not send her to her death: she was sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment, and she died in 1884.
The verdict mattered beyond the courtroom. Geneva's jurors had been unwilling to impose the death penalty on a woman convicted of several murders, and that unwillingness fed the movement that ended capital punishment in the canton. In 1871 Geneva abolished the death penalty, except under military law.
Jeanneret was born on January 13, 1836, at Le Locle, in the canton of Neuchâtel. She lost her parents when she was young. They left her enough money to live on, and that inheritance shaped her working life: when she took up nursing, she could do it without asking for a fee.
As a young woman she became preoccupied with her own health and spent a great deal of time in the company of doctors, who regarded most of her complaints as imaginary. Her family life, schooling and the years between Le Locle and Geneva are not on record. By 1868 she was 32 and a trained sick nurse.
Jeanneret nursed the sick of Geneva without charging for her work. Those she harmed were of every age: the youngest was a girl of eleven, the oldest a woman of seventy-two.
The deaths came close together. In the nine months that ended in June 1868, at least six people in her care died.
The case broke open in June 1868. A physician reported his suspicions to the authorities, and they moved against her that month. Jeanneret was taken into custody in Geneva.
She did not deny that the patients had died at her hands. She spoke of the deaths freely and called them mistakes. The examining authorities looked at nine cases in all. Physicians who had worked alongside her judged her to be sane.
Jeanneret was tried in Geneva later in 1868, before a jury. The exact wording of the charges, the dates of the hearings and the names of the judges and counsel are not on record. Public feeling in the courtroom ran strongly against her. Her defense was that she had meant no harm.
The jury found her guilty of murder in six or seven cases. The jurors also declined to take the step that the law allowed them. They did not impose the death penalty, and Jeanneret was sentenced instead to twenty years' imprisonment. The precise words of the jury's finding in her favor are not on record, nor is the date on which the verdict was returned.
The verdict left her guilt beyond doubt. What the jury refused was the death penalty, and in 1871 Geneva's authorities drew their own conclusion from that refusal.
The court that tried Jeanneret worked within a system built up over the first half of the nineteenth century. Under the Restoration from 1814, Geneva ran a mixed judicial system based on the institutions of the old regime, topped by a Tribunal de recours, and the jury disappeared. The constitution of 1842 kept judges independent and elected by the Grand Council, and it separated the criminal courts according to the seriousness of the case, with a court of its own for minor matters.
The radical constitution of 1847 changed the judiciary in three main ways. Judges were to be elected by the people. The jury, which had vanished at the Restoration, was restored, presented as a democratic gain because each accused person would be judged by his or her peers. And the justice of the peace was introduced. The same constitution guaranteed the existence of the popular jury and set out the questions of fact to be put to the jury of the Cour d'assises. Eugène Colladon, a Geneva jurist who had served as attorney general in the 1840s, sat as a judge of the cantonal Cour de justice from 1848 to 1874 and was its president from 1863.
The substantive law was older still. The French penal code had been in use in Geneva since 1811, during French rule, and after the restoration of the republic it stayed in force, amended rather than replaced. Two leading criminal-law thinkers, Pellegrino Rossi and Étienne Dumont, guided the revision of Geneva's criminal laws in the nineteenth century, but a full Geneva penal code came only in 1874. In 1868, then, a Geneva jury deciding a murder case was applying a code of French origin, modified by local legislation, under a constitution that had put ordinary citizens back in the jury box.
The question of capital punishment had a long history in the canton. In 1816 Jean-Jacques de Sellon, influenced by Voltaire and Cesare Beccaria, asked Geneva's Grand Council to abolish the death penalty. The death penalty nonetheless stayed in Geneva's law until 1871.
The jury's unwillingness to apply the death penalty to Jeanneret led the Geneva authorities to withdraw it altogether. In 1871 Geneva abolished the death penalty except in military matters; Ticino abolished it in the same year.
The details of Jeanneret's imprisonment, including where she served her sentence, are not on record. She died in 1884; the place and circumstances of her death are not on record.
The number of deaths is not settled. At least six patients died in the nine months before June 1868, the convicted count stands at six or seven, and nine cases were examined before trial. She was suspected in 1868 of about twenty deaths, and has since been suspected of trying to harm about thirty people. None of these larger figures was proved in court, and they remain suspicion only.
Her first case is attributed to 1866, when a friend was the first person she harmed. Whether the friend died is not on record, and no court finding on that case is known.
Her motive is not settled. She called the deaths mistakes. Contemporaries doubted that either cruelty or scientific curiosity explained them, and suggested instead that she may have singled out difficult patients, or that she was driven by a craving for the power to end a life. None of these explanations was a finding of the court.
January 13, 1836: Marie Jeanneret is born at Le Locle, canton of Neuchâtel.
Childhood: orphaned; her parents leave her enough money to live on.
1847: Geneva's new constitution restores the jury and provides for popular election of judges.
1866: a first case is later attributed to her; no court finding on it is known.
The nine months to June 1868: at least six patients in her care die in Geneva.
June 1868: a physician reports his suspicions; she is arrested in Geneva and admits the deaths, calling them mistakes.
1868: tried before a jury in Geneva; found guilty of murder; the jury declines to impose death; sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment.
1871: Geneva abolishes the death penalty, except under military law.
1874: Geneva adopts its own penal code, replacing the amended French code.
1884: Jeanneret dies.