Foreign News: Justice on Trial

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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.