We often beat on the US legal system for its many failings but this news story gave the flip side of some pretty serious problems with the Napoleonic system.
Which system is fairer overall?
Considering the U.S. has been host to similar cases of justice gone completely off the rails (the McMartin Day Care fiasco being among the most famous), I’d say your example doesn’t really suggest a specific problem with the French system.
Quebec also follows civil law, while the rest of Canada follows common law. Offhand, I can’t think of a time when the difference was all that significant.
I don’t think that’s a fair comparison in the context of the OP, which relates to French criminal process. The criminal law in Canada is exclusively federal, and is based on the English common law, not the French Napoleanic system.
But I do agree that each system has its potential flaws; I don’t think you can extrapolate from one bad case that the system needs to be replaced.
I tend to like certain aspects of both legal systems. Both systems are ran by human beings, and thus there will always be error. One bad judge in the Napoleonic system is worse than a bad judge in the English common law system because our judges do not have as much power. But in our system a shady prosecutor can get innocent people convicted just as easily as this judge did, and a “hanging” judge is still pretty damn bad to have presiding over your case if you’re a criminal defendant in the English common law system.
And of course juries made up of people who almost never have any professional knowledge concerning the legal system certainly aren’t a perfect guarantor of defendants receiving a just and fair outcome.
How serious are people who are calling for an end to the Napoleonic system? I can’t imagine someone in America calling for a complete change of our entire way of conducting the law just because of one bad person in the system being highly inept or even malicious.
There’s probably a cultural insight in there, but damned if I can see it. Our system is the best in the world–why would we change it?
My home state of Louisiana has its legal system based on the Napoleonic Code. The differences between it and the other 49 states have eroded over time but I never got the impression that Louisiana’s legal system is inherently less fair than its neighbors.
IIRC, Shag, the two US jurisdictions that base their legal systems on Civil Code Law are Louisiana and Puerto Rico. At least in our case, this is more notable in the civil realm, with Criminal Procedure having converged with the US pattern so much that laymen can’t tell the differences. Of course, because the Federal Constitution and Case Law requires that the US’s component states and dependent territories/commonwealths adopt Republican constitutions with separation of powers, the figure of the “Judge Inquirer” of other civilist jurisdictions does not exist in LA or PR.
In any case the OP example doesn’t seem to point to anything essential to the system, but to those running it. And it’s not that different from the “never apologize, never back down, never admit error” default position of US prosecutors and judges who are faced with the possibility that they nailed an innocent man.
Oh, I dunno, I think in the US it’s often heard about when it comes to jury verdicts that public opinion does not like, and people will call the Talk Shows to talk about how they should change how juries work or even eliminate juries.
I read and heard a couple respected jurists calling for this. However, I must said that no simpler useful reform has been implemented to adress already well-known issues, despite many proposals in the past.
Basically, most of the blame is laid at the feet of the investigating judge. And these people who want to end up the current system would want to replace these judges by prosecutors. I’m personnally opposed to that because I can’t see what difference it would make. So, one investigating judge, who was supposed to lead the enquiries both on behalf of the defense and of the prosecution, was so convinced the accused were guilty that he allegedly made a complete mess that resulted in the case of people considered by everybody as obviously guilty, (and who had spent a long time in jail) collapsing in a such blatant way during the trial that the prosecutor himself, IIRC, asked the jurors to find several of them innocent or at least didn’t request a sentence, I don’t remember exactly.
But how would have it been different in the US/british system, with a prosecutor equally convinced that the accused were guilty, equally determined to have them pay for their supposed crimes, and equally uninterested in listening to them?
Now, there has been, during the recent years, some serious proposals to slightly reform the system for instance simply by not giving the investigation job to young judges just out of school (precisely the case of this particular judge, who ended up with the “child abuse network” case of the century) or to replace this lone investigating judge by a panel of two or three (but of course, it was never implemented because it would cost too much :rolleyes: ), etc…
Now, he wasn’t the only one to fail. The judges of the “chambre d’accusation” (who roughly do the same job the “grand jury” does in the US, if I’m not mistaken) validated his conclusions, the “juge des libertes” who has to validate the decisions to jail accused people did the same, and even the jurors, at the general amazement, found, seemingly randomly, a handful of the accused guilty for no apparent reason. They were acquited in appeal, but everybody considered them innocent since the ludicrous first trial.
I thing that society as a whole is also guilty in this case, due to the “pedophile scare” that made everybody paranoid, the fear of many people involved from psychologists to judges to let child molesters go away with it, and the social pressure they certainly strongly felt.
Just to sum up the case : several kids from two neighboring families were abused, raped, etc… by their parents. Upon their arrest, these abusers accused pretty much everybody noticeable in the neighborhood (the priest, the baker, the plumber, the lawyer, etc…) to have been involved. Well…one of them did, and the three other parents, then the children, followed suit, giving birth to a pedophile network.
During the trial, the children, apart from one of them (and it was revealed that, years after , he was still pointing at random strangers and accusing them of rape in his foster family’s town) changed their statements, one of the parents, then three, then all of them admited they had falsely accused the neighbors, hoping it would dilute their responsability, then one changed again her stance, stating that actually the neighbors really were guilty, it was shown that besides the testimonies and one admission gotten under the false offer of dropping charges, there was no evidences altogether pointing at the neighbors, that the investigating judge had barely heard them, the expert psychiatrist who was a witness for the accusation ridiculed herself in court, etc… Basically a trial that was waited by an angry public ready to hang everybody at the nearest lampost turned into a farce, during which the public was wondering what would the most laughable event of the day.
At least, it served a purpose, because since the first trial (the appeal was nearly a formality, and reported by the press as looking more like a group therapy for the accused and previously acquited people called as witnesses than a trial), the issues of wrongly accused people and the consequences on their life (job lost, house sold, divorce, children not seen for years…), of the way detention pending the trial is handled, of the excess of the child molester’s “witch hunt”, of the indemnization of innocent people who spent time in jail, the role played by the medias, etc… had been widely discussed, and this was, IMO, really necessary. A least high-profile case wouldn’t have had the same result, but would have gone unnoticed, with the broken down falsely accused sent on his way with a pat on the shoulder. Here, instead, we had everybody up to the president involved, a parliamentary commission, major media coverage, etc…
Well, for one, the prosecutor isn’t the one running the freakin’ trial. Each side is responsible for presenting their evidence, and no matter how determined the prosecutor is of the defendant’s guilt, he still has to defer to the judge, and to overcome the defense’s arguments and evidence to convince the jury.
FYI the investigating magistrate doesn’t preside over the actual trial. For serious crimes are tried in the Assize Courts by 3 judges and 9 jurors.
France has a long reputation for having horrific prison conditions and an iffy legal system.
OK, right there a lot of people used to the Anglo/American system would see a major potential for conflict-of-interest. I mean, I think I understand that the thinking behind the Judge-Inquirer is that both prosecution and defense have the equal full weight and resources of the system behind their assemblage of the case, but how real is that? And those accustomed to the other system would wonder why not then TWO Judge-Inquirers, one pro, one anti.
Of course, as you mention, in the prosecutorial-office system we have the problem of crusading prosecutors seeking to “nail” the accused and deliberately NOT providing to the defense or the court any potentially exculpatory information info that may come up. And of hard evidence of innocence coming up later and the prosecutors and courts standing firm on that they’re not going to admit error.
[stanley kowalski – “a streetcar named desire”]
Y’see, in Louisiana we got da Napoleonic Code . . . What’s da husband’s is da wife’s and what’s da wife’s is da husband’s . . . Under da Napoleonic Code a husband’s gotta take an interest in his wife’s business. Especially when dey got a baby on da way.
[/sk–“snd”]
Nitpicks:
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The adversarial system of justice has nothing to do with the separation-of-powers system of government. (The UK has an adversarial system of justice but a parliamentary system of government.)
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Article Four of the Constitution guarantees every state a “Republican Form of Government,” but what does or does not qualify as such has never been put to the test. Case law says that call is to be made by Congress, not the courts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_Four_of_the_United_States_Constitution#Obligations_of_the_United_States If a Canadian province with a parliamentary system instead of a separation-of-powers system were admitted as a state, I expect it would be allowed to maintain its existing form of government.
Then why does the U.S. have such a higher proportion of its population in prison? (See this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=304071)
Agreed. I think the conditions surrounding this sort of case have much more to do with moral panic and public outcry than the legal system in which they take place.
Thanks so much to the OP for bringing this up, as I’d completely forgotten about the case but was in utter disbelief when the media began reporting on the alleged incidents. The scope and severity of the crimes just seemed too unbelievable to be true, and I was sure they’d be revealed as false (or vastly exaggerated) within a month or so. Guess it took a little longer.
A nation that only has five prisoners can have horrific prison conditions, if those five prisioners are treated like shit.
And a nation with a high proportion of its population in prison can have a near-perfect legal system - it may simply catch more criminals and/or criminalize more behavior.
I’m not saying whether France or the US has better prisons or a better legal system. I’m saying that your objection is irrelevant - you are comparing apples and bananas.
Sua
Nor is the investigating judge in the french system. His job stops when the “chambre d’accusation” decides to send the accused to trial, on the basis of his conclusions, evidences gathrered, etc… He then went on investigating some other crime, the trial is ran by completely different judges and he never appears in it.
Yes, that’s the idea. In the US system, the prosecutor has the full weight and means of the state behind him, while the accused has whatever the lawyer he can afford does.
How real is that? I dunno. Apparently, in this case at least, the judge-inquirer has decided these people were guilty, and (at least according to the accused) was only interested in evidences against them. I don’t know if it works well usually, though the “judge-inquirer” is often called “the most powerful man in France” and this isn’t a positive statement.
Then you would probably need a third one as a arbitrator and to eventually decide to give up the case, close the enquiries, send the accused to the accusation chamber or not, I assume.
Now, given that they didn’t want to have two or three judge-inquirers following the same case so as to precisely limit the risk of a lone prejudiced judge tainting the case, not mainly because it could be confusing or because many judge-inquirers want to work alone, but plainly because it would cost money, I don’t see this happening.
Besides, I’m sure the system you’re proposing would have many consequences and the procedure would have to be completely reorganized, and I’m sure it would be quite complicated. probably more than just adopting an already tested sytem.
Finally, wouldn’t the “anti-judge” job essentially the same as the prosecutor’s job in the US? So, wouldn’t this be more or less taking the US system and adding an “anti-prosecutor” would could order inquiries in foavor of the accused, for instance at the request of his lawyer, and more or less trying to undermine the case of the prosecutor? More or less, actually, a “super public lawyer” with the same powers as a prosecutor? That looks fine and fair to me, but I doubt we’ll ever see such a system anywhere…