The Perp Walk Is Not a French Tradition

Among the more incisive French responses to the arrest of Dominique Strauss-Kahn on charges of sexual assault comes from Eva Joly, the French magistrate, representative to the European Parliament, and possible 2012 presidential candidate (for the Green Party), whose remarks on radio today are quoted, in the Communist daily L’Humanité, about the reporting of Strauss-Kahn’s arrest and the American judicial system:

These are very violent images and I think that it [the American system] doesn’t distinguish between the director of the I.M.F. and any other suspect. It’s the idea of the equality of rights… It’s also a much more violent judicial system because they don’t take into account mitigating circumstances as we do, and so, if you choose to plead not guilty and you’re convicted, you get a maximum sentence.

Funny to think that a leftist would want an international banker to get preferential treatment; the perp walk seems to have no French counterpart. But Joly’s more substantial remarks, regarding the differences between the two countries’ judicial systems, deserves consideration, especially from a cinematic perspective. The documentary filmmaker Raymond Depardon has gotten inside the French system with an extraordinary pair of films. “Délits Flagrants” (or “Caught in the Act,” which I saw in Paris in January, 1995, soon after its release, but haven’t seen since), shows suspects in holding cells being confronted by prosecutors in face-to-face questioning (without their attorneys). “Tenth District Court,” from 2004, is, as I wrote in a review of the film when it was shown here, a fascinating depiction of

life without the Fifth Amendment. The twelve defendants who appear before Judge Michèle Bernard-Requin and her colleagues for such offenses as drunk driving, marijuana peddling, petty larceny, and arms possession must stand at a podium in the center of court and answer her direct questions. Without a jury to seduce, the defendants wear their usual clothes and speak their mind with a refreshingly contentious frankness, and defense attorneys are reduced to a supporting role. Yet those defendants who are not penalized for lying are done in by their confessions, and the effect, unlike the ritualized theatre of American proceedings, is of a blood sport like bullfighting that only a connoisseur with a strong stomach can enjoy.

Which is to say that I consider the French system to be, pace Joly, a much more violent judicial system, because the defendant is subjected to judicial authority without mediation, and to direct, and unrefusable, questioning. Also, there’s no jury: the defendant is tried by judges unless the accusation is of a major felony. The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, has recently proposed the generalized trial by jury, and it’s proving very controversial—for instance, the great French lawyer Robert Badinter, a Socialist (and the leading force behind France’s abolition of the death penalty), recently told a journalist from Libération “judging is a profession that requires knowledge and experience,” and as for the idea of juries representing the rendering of justice by “the people,” he added, “I would remind you that magistrates are citizens too, the same as jurors.”

The reason why the courtroom drama is an American genre and not a French one is that the American trial is inherently a form of theatre; the French courtroom, with its judges questioning the accused, is inherently a display of power, a subjection, an infliction. Here’s a subtitled trailer for “Tenth District Court”:

P.S. According to the French Wikipedia entry for Eva Joly, Claude Chabrol borrowed elements of her life and work for the film “The Comedy of Power,” about the prosecution of a big businessman for corruption. It’s the best of Chabrol’s later films, and it looks askance at the zeal of the magistrate’s investigation. The director, too, seems to have winked at “the idea of the equality of rights,” but he does so with a gleeful and openly sybaritic cynicism, which I discussed at the time of its release here.