French ex-president Sarkozy begins jail sentence

I think you should say convicted instead of condemned. It's not really wrong, but condemned has many other connotations, which makes it less clear. It's not the first time he's convicted in court overall, but it's the first time for this charge.

Please, can you explains the difference between "convicted" and "condemned"? Convicted is about the fact of been a criminal and condemned about the fact that you have a condamnation/conviction/sentence?

"Convicted" is a neutral, technical term meaning "a court found him guilty of that crime". "Condemned" can mean the same thing, with the added tone "the crime was particularly heinous or immoral, and he got served with a fitting, just and hard punishment". It includes a moral judgement about the crime and about the deservedness of the punishment. There are also meanings of "condemned" that are used in a religious context (so the same as above, but without the court of law) like "the sinner is condemned to hell for all eternity", "sisyphos was condemned to eternal useless labor". Metaphorically, it can also be used to describe someone without the power to exact punishment just telling off somebody for their immoral behaviour, like "the newspaper article condemned his doings as acts of barbarism".

The general difference is that "convicted" is neutral in tone. "Condemned" includes a particular tone, and religious and moral connotations, which might be unfitting in some cases.

Edit: Take the above with some grain of salt, might be at least incomplete, maybe somewhat wrong. After consulting the internet, I've found out that there are even more meanings and nuances, which I didn't know about. Sorry for being an arrogant non-native-speaker trying to score internet points ;)

Apparently, in English, convicted means that someone has been officially declared guilty of some crime. After being convicted comes being sentenced, which is when the punishment is set.

On the other hand, condemned is specifically about being sentenced to death -or sometimes life in prison or some similarly hard punishment-. Which is also why a building is said to be condemned when it is set to be demolished.

Condemned has many other connotations which get in the way. "She condemned him" (she declared that he was reprehensible). "We condemn racism" (We really don't like racism). "Eternal condemnation" (Going to hell). And other meanings I'm sure that I'm not aware of.

Interestingly in french we use "condamné" for sentenced, and for any kind of sentence (even a fine).

We don't ever use "sentence" in a legal context (it still exists but is old fashioned), things diverged quite a bit it seems between those languages.

In Spain, in a legal context, it's either condenado (condemned) or sentenciado (sentenced) more or less indistinctly. I have the impression we use a lot of words without much care for details.

Out of that context, it's usually condenado the one used.

Thank you. Past a certain level it's pretty hard for non native speakers to improve because you don't get tons of this kind of feedbacks.