The experimental introduction last year in France of citizen jurors to assist magistrates in trials of crimes which carry a punishment of between five and ten years is to be abandoned after an official report found the scheme to be to be ill-conceived, unmanageable and too costly, Mediapart can reveal.
The report on the experiment, co-authored by senior appeals court (Cour de cassation) magistrates Didier Boccon-Gibod and Xavier Salvat, was presented to justice minister Christiane Taubira on Thursday.
Introduced under the conservative government of former president Nicolas Sarkozy, the scheme allowed for two citizen jurors to assist three magistrates in judging and sentencing crimes against the person such as assault, sexual violence, serious road traffic offences and aggravated burglary. These are tried in courts called Tribunaux Correctionels where verdicts and sentencing were, until last year, exclusively decided by a panel of magistrates.
The move was criticized by Sarkozy’s political opponents as a hurriedly prepared pre-election attempt to satisfy a section of public opinion that perceived magistrates’ sentencing of such crimes as too lenient. The unstated but clearly intended message behind the legislation was that the jurors would act as a check upon the magistrates who, unlike prosecutors, are independent judicial figures.
Sarkozy, first as interior minister then as president, had led several outspoken attacks on magistrates regarding both the length of sentences they delivered and for allowing the early release of prisoners who went on to re-offend. Indeed, he publicly announced the scheme to introduce the citizen jurors to the Tribunaux Correctionels during a TV debate in 2011, just weeks after the kidnap and murder in Brittany of 18 year-old waitress Laetitia Perrais. It was alleged at the time, not least by Sarkozy himself, that it was bungling by magistrates that had allowed the man suspected of carrying out the crime, Tony Meilhon, who had previous convictions for rape and armed robbery, to escaped proper surveillance after his release from prison in 2010.
“President Sarkozy has always said that we magistrates are not hard enough on criminals,” commented Virginie Duval, head of the Union Syndicale des Magistrats, one of the two leading French magistrates’ unions, in an interview with French TV news channel FRANCE 24 in January 2012. “When he launched this bid to bring in more juries it was because he felt it would satisfy public demands for tougher sentences.”
“It is a political move,” she added. “It always suits the government to be critical of the judiciary.”
Previously, citizen juries sat only in higher courts (Cours d’Assises) where trials of the most serious crimes, notably murder, are conducted. In these cases, the verdicts are decided by nine jurors and three magistrates.
The experiment, which began in January 2012, five months before the presidential elections and ensuing legislative elections, has been led in five courts in south-west France - Toulouse, Castres, Albi, Montauban and Foix – and four in the centre-east, in Dijon, Chaumont, Chalon-sur-Saône and Mâcon.
Under the legislation enacting the scheme, prepared by former justice minister Michel Mercier and passed in August 2011, the citizen jurors were to become a permanent feature in all of France’s Tribunaux Correctionels in 2014 – if the experiment proved a success.
But the damning report delivered to Taubira on February 28th heralds the end of the plan. Contacted by Mediapart, a justice ministry official, who asked not to be named, said the experiment was soon to be abandoned, along with any further use of citizen jurors in the Tribunaux Correctionels, although a precise date has not yet been fixed for when a decree to that effect would be pronounced.
Jurors 'not armed to deal with legal questions'
The report found that the process of selecting and training the jurors is too demanding of the justice system, which is also further financially stretched by the cost of indemnities they are paid.
Above all, it reveals that the trials where the citizen jurors sat take much longer to be heard than where they don’t. On average, a court sitting without the jurors hears between eight and 20 separate trials, whereas a court where the jurors are present hears an average of just three trials per sitting. One of the reasons for this is that the citizen jurors must be advised on the detail and stipulations of the relevant criminal law.
As a result, the courts in question have a large backlog of cases to be heard and of rulings to be pronounced. Without any increase in staff to ease the problem, the workload has stretched what magistrates’ associations say is an already creaking system to its limits.
Furthermore, the report found that, contrary to the primary motive for introducing the scheme, “nothing allows one to conclude that the rulings delivered are more severe”. In fact, there are several instances where the citizen jurors have shown themselves to be more clement in sentencing than the magistrates.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
On a positive note, the report said the jurors it interviewed said their experience had “considerably improved” their perception of “the image of the justice system”.
But it also noted that justice officials they questioned agreed that “the participation of citizens [as jurors] has no effect on the course of justice, and [they] deplore that such a deployment of effort can only result, with unchanged resources, upon a degradation of the jurisdiction’s performance”.
The cases heard in the Tribunaux Correctionels, where the experiment has been led, are shorter and generally involve more legal technicalities than those heard by the Cours d’Assises where juries traditionally sit. “Knowing nothing about law and the justice system, they are expected to [act like] judges,” the report said of the jurors. “They are not technically armed to deal with judicial questions,” it underlined.
Several of the jurors interviewed for the report “did not consider themselves as judges, but as people required to give an opinion”, and declared that they preferred to leave sentencing decisions to the magistrates, the report added.
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English version: Graham Tearse