In his new book, this former judge from Caen pays Éric Dupond-Moretti

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He had devoted his first book to a miscarriage of justice dating from 1910, “The Jules Durand affair, when judicial error becomes a crime”. Accused of an assassination that he did not commit, this dockworker from Le Havre was wrongly sentenced to death. This time, Marc Hédrich looks at three judicial errors of “impunity”. “In these three cases, we did not condemn people who clearly should have been convicted,” explains the former magistrate of the Court of Appeal of Caen (Calvados)to give a definition to the term impunity. Everything overwhelmed these three assassins.”

Three murderers acquitted

Investigations had shown that the three main characters of Marc Hédrich’s new book, “The scandalous acquittals of the Roaring Twenties”which he dedicates this Saturday, September 28, 2024 in Caen, had targeted their victims. They had also bought a gun, practiced shooting it and got so close that the deceased were shot at point blank range. “So many constituent elements of premeditation,” notes Judge Hédrich.

Juries without magistrates

Yet, Raoul Villain, Germaine Berton and Henriette Caillaux all three were acquitted. The first remained in history as the assassin of Jean JaurèsJuly 31, 1914. To avenge the latter, Germaine Berton had killed Marius Plateauthe director of the French Action League, a far-right magazine, in 1923. Henriette Caillaux, for her part, was the wife of the Minister of Finance at the time, Joseph Caillaux. “It was he who invented the income tax,” recalls Marc Hédrich. As such, he was hated by the liberals.” No longer able to stand the press campaign to which her husband was the subject, Henriette killed the director of Le Figaro, Gaston Calmettein the newspaper’s premises, in March 1914.

I had to create the neologism “assassines” to evoke Germaine and Henriette, because, in the French language, there is no feminine in the word assassin. The press called them murderers. In the vocabulary, we did not envisage that a woman could premeditate such an action.

How could the jurors acquit these three criminalsarrested with weapons in hand? This is what Marc Hédrich tried to understand, by combining their three trajectories with his knowledge of the judicial system. To achieve this, he delved into the archives of the time and places these facts in their historical context. “Jean Jaurès, editor-in-chief of l’Humanité, was assassinated on July 31, 1914, on the eve of the First World War,” underlines the author. Nationalist, Raoul Villain killed him because he was fighting for peace.” However, the Villain trial was not held until 1919, once the conflict with Germany had ended. “Pacifism was no longer fashionable,” continues Marc Hédrich. After half an hour of deliberationthe jurors felt in a way pity for Villain, who had nevertheless confessed to his crime. At the time, jurors retired to deliberate at the end of trials outside the presence of magistrates professionals. Unlike today, they were not drawn randomly from the electoral lists. They were mainly notables, and only men. “Women did not yet have the status of citizens,” notes the Norman judge.

To the point that Henriette Caillaux’s lawyer, who had defended Alfred Dreyfus a few years earlier, had pleaded the crime of passion despite the obvious preparation.

Addressing the men who made up the jury, he asked them: how do you expect premeditation to be lodged in a woman’s brain?

The role of the press

Another explanation for these “scandalous acquittals” lies in the mission given to the jurors. Until a law of 1941, which introduced professional magistrates into Assize juries, they did not have to give reasons for their decision. They had to answer “yes” or “no” to two simple questions: did the accused kill the victim? was there premeditation? “If the accused was found guilty, it was automatically the death penalty and there was no possible appeal,” explains Marc Hédrich. It happened that the jurors answered “no” to avoid putting someone on the scaffold.”

These verdicts, sometimes imbued with humanity, however had unexpected consequences in the cases highlighted by Marc Hédrich. “Certain acquittals set a precedent and some saw it as a right to kill. Raoul Villain thus discovered that Henriette Caillaux had been acquitted, three days before killing Jean Jaurès.

The last point in common between these three cases is that they all have a close link with the press. The three victims were journalists, both left and right, and were killed in their editorial offices or in the immediate vicinity. “The written press had an enormous influence on public opinion at the time,” insists Judge Hédrich. These cases constituted real soap operas.”

“I had a bad experience with the reform”

While putting the finishing touches to his manuscript, Marc Hédrich, then stationed at the Court of Appeal of Caen (he notably chaired the Assize Courts of Manche and Orne) was confronted with criminal justice reform desired by the very recent former Minister of Justice, Eric Dupond-Moretti. Experimented in Calvados, this reform set up criminal courts with the argument of relieving congestion in the Assize Courts.

I had a bad experience with this reform because I am very attached to the association of citizens in the delivery of justice. In the criminal courts, there are only three professional magistrates.

The coincidence between the theme of his book and the identity of the man he considers “the gravedigger of popular juries”, nicknamed Acquittator due to the number of acquittals obtained during his career as a lawyer, gave him the idea of ​​adding a final chapter to his work. “The criminal courts judge 90% of rape casesobserves Marc Hédrich. Does this mean that we do not treat rape like other crimes? At the time of MeTooI find this unacceptable! »

Specialist in judicial errors

This is also one of the reasons which pushed him to request, as he neared the end of his career, a transfer to Martinique. On this island in the Antilles, there are “five times more blood crimes than in mainland France”. As president of the Assize Court of Martinique, Marc Hédrich can therefore debate with the jurors at the end of the trials.

Overseas, he also unearthed the subject of his next work. Again, this will be a miscarriage of justice.

I’m not spitting in the soup, quite the contrary. It seems to me that justice grows when it recognizes its errors and corrects them.

Justice of the 21st^e century presents numerous “guarantees of better functioning” (appeal, rights of defense, independence of investigating judges, etc.) but, according to Marc Hédrich, “the road is still long” to achieve justice without errors. Enough to publish a few more volumes.

The scandalous acquittals of the Roaring Twenties, by Marc Hédrich (Michalon editions). In bookstores since September 12 (€22).

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