Justice on Trial

In the week when the French Assembly proved again its willful capacity for chaos, French justice also came in for well-deserved attack. "What is wrong with our justice?" demanded France Dimanche. "Henceforward," added Paris' Paris-Presse, "it is hard to see how we can have the nerve to give lessons to totalitarian police."

French justice, based on the Napoleonic Code, has long been viewed with cynicism by its friends and alarm by disciples of Anglo-Saxon procedures. "The Code exists to protect society from the criminal, not to protect the criminal from judicial error," explains one French expert. "We run our courts to convict the guilty, not to acquit the innocent." Last week the case of a Nantes stevedore, only the most recent of a series of setbacks of justice, touched off a storm of indignation.

Getting Confessions. Seven years ago, someone accused Stevedore Jean Deshays of killing an old man, beating his wife, and robbing them of $50. Police briskly beat a confession out of Deshays, and he was sentenced to ten years' hard labor. Last year police discovered that three other men had committed the crime. At his retrial last week, Deshays explained why he had confessed: "I was afraid. There were a lot of people and police there."

Newspapers angrily recalled other cases of police brutality. One woman, acquitted last month of poisoning her lover's wife, had been held illegally by police for three days while they kicked her, pulled her hair, and insulted her in an effort to get a confession. In 1948 a sanitarium worker was kept standing for 28 hours without food to force her to confess killing a man who later was proved to have died of cerebral hemorrhage.

Preparing the Dossier. But more serious critics assailed the French judicial system itself. Under French law. there is no grand jury; instead, there is the juge d'instruction, whom Balzac called the most powerful man in the Republic. He performs the role of investigating magistrate. His great power is that, on his decision, and his alone, he can put any suspect in jail under "preventive detention'' while he investigates the case and prepares a dossier for the trial. Such "preventive detentions" can last for years.

Of ten defendants now awaiting trial at the Paris Assizes this week, one has been in jail for 32 months; the average is 18 months. Even if the defendant is eventually acquitted, he has no redress, receives no compensation for his long imprisonment. Bail is almost unheard of; Frenchmen consider it an undemocratic favoring of the rich over the poor.

The juge d'instruction is usually young, inexperienced, so ill-paid that he often has no telephone or typewriter. Originally, magistrates were recruited from men of substance anxious to perform civic duty. Today, the underpaid magistrature has become the refuge of law graduates who fear failure as lawyers, and the juge d'instruction is the lowest rung on the judicial ladder. In the case of Marie Besnard, accused poisoner of 13 relatives and friends, the juge d'instruction was a 26-year-old, newly promoted from clerk, who never visited the scene of the crime, sent out to the local grocery for canning jars to hold the viscera of the 13 alleged victims, and the jars ended so badly mixed up no one was sure which was which. But he kept Marie Besnard in jail for five years in "preventive detention.'' The 28-year-old juge d'instruction investigating young Brazilian playboy Jonsine da Silva Ramos' wife's death announced to the press: "I believe him guilty. It's up to him to prove his innocence."

Judge & Prosecutor. After the juge d'instruction comes a trial before three magistrates. In theory, the chief judge is impartial, explaining the arguments to the jury. In practice, he does not arbitrate, he prosecutes. French judges are generally considered honest and conscientious; the role is forced on them by the system. The chief judge must operate from the dossier prepared by the juge d'instruction, and the dossier is obviously the state's case against the accused. In effect, the chief judge challenges the defense counsel to disprove the dossier; he himself questions the defendant and the witnesses. The prosecutor merely keeps notes until it is time to sum up.

Then the seven-man jury files out--and the three magistrates go along too, to join in the deliberations and to vote with the jury. In case of a tie vote, the verdict is the decision of the chief judge. Because a record of convictions is the road to advancement, magistrates are almost automatically for conviction. Thus the defendant is faced with the uphill battle of trying to convince six out of seven jurors against the prestige, persuasiveness and presence of the three magistrates in the jury room.

Trouble Goes Deep. Some French critics argue that all that is needed is higher pay to attract better men as magistrates. France's 4,000 magistrates average barely $200 a month. (A few years ago, one was fished out of the Seine, and colleagues discovered his wife and four children living in an abandoned factory, sleeping on old rags.) Others think the trouble is deeper seated, and will not be settled until judges are confined to judging, and kept out of jury rooms. Wrote Prizewinning Novelist Francois Mauriac last week: "There is no criminal case today in which the principal defendant is not French justice."

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