Toulouse lawyers demand the end of departmental criminal courts
The departmental criminal courts must be generalized to the whole territory from January 1st. They will deal with the “less serious” crimes, mainly rape and sexual assault, reserving other crimes for the assize courts. the Toulouse bar dress a contrasting record of the experimentation of the departmental criminal court in Haute-Garonne. In a motion, signed on December 6, the lawyers of the Toulouse bar ask that the popular assize court jury is preserved and that the experimentation of the criminal court be stopped. Since January 2021 in Haute-Garonne, dozens of cases of rape and attempted rape have been tried without any popular jury, but by five professional magistrates.
“We are removing the last democratic bastion of justice”
These departmental criminal courts”will not carry forward the purposes for which they were created” regrets the president of the order of lawyers in Toulouse, Pierre Dunac. The three objectives were to reduce the processing times of criminal cases, to save money, and to avoid correctionalization (when we downgrade the criminal qualification of a crime into a misdemeanor). Pierre Dunac regrets that these courses go “against what is a symbol of our justice, created by the 1989 Revolution, namely the justice rendered by the citizens. By removing the popular jury, the last democratic bastion of justice is removed.”
“To the exclusion of the citizen from his participation in justice, the assize trials also had an educational vocation. It is an extraordinary experience. And the magistrates confronted with a popular jury were also getting closer to society.“
“The justice of the assize court, quality justice, we will make it a slaughter justice, like that rendered before the criminal courts.”
As for criminal delays, we would have gone from 4.5 years of waiting for an assize trial to 11.8 months before the departmental courts. But beware of the logic of “profitability”, an “accounting” logic that does not take quality into account warns Pierre Dunac. “These criminal courts must be able to judge within six monthsto the East rather at nine months after the close of the investigation. Assize courts, they are intended to judge at one year. Earning three months is not a big deal.”
More than 50% of crimes will be tried in criminal courts, from 2023. Pierre Dunac fears that we will lose out in terms of the oral nature of the debates. “The real difference with an assize court is that all the magistrates have the file.” About the workload, it will not be lightened for the magistrates, the clerks, already understaffed and overwhelmed according to Pierre Dunac: “these criminal courts composed of five magistrates against three at the assizes penalize other services: civil justice, family affairs. Today in Toulouse, we no longer have a victim compensation service, which is completely at a standstill.
The lawyers of the Toulouse Bar requiring a bill from a member of Europe Ecology the GreensFrancesca Pasquini, to preserve the popular jury, and still hope that the Keeper of the Seals will return to these departmental criminal courts: “he was totally opposed to it before becoming Keeper of the Seals, today he is at the service of accounting shopkeepers who sacrifice quality justice“.