During their pleadings, the defense lawyers requested a release, in the context of the trial of the collapses in rue d’Aubagne, on Monday December 16 and Tuesday December 17.
The lawyers of the main defendants in the fatal collapses on rue d’Aubagne, in Marseille, pleaded this Monday and Tuesday, December 16 and 17, for acquittal, passing the buck or shifting responsibility onto those absent from the trial.
“The court is not a forum, it is not seized of unworthy housing,” began to explain Me Christophe Bass, the lawyer for the trustee of 65 rue d’Aubagne, who collapsed on the 5th November 2018 killing eight people. For him, the Liautard firm “did its job even if its proposals were rejected by the co-owners”.
“A heresy”
But for Me Pierre Ceccaldi, it is “heresy” to have prosecuted the co-owners of 65 rue d’Aubagne who had not been prosecuted during the investigation but were summoned to appear in court by civil parties. For the lawyer, the “trial of intent” was carried out on an alleged “greed” of his client, Xavier Cachard, owner, lawyer for the trustee and also at the time regional elected official.
He certainly did not “express his feelings” during the seven weeks of hearing but it was out of “modesty”, defended Mr. Ceccaldi, believing that there was “nothing” to condemn him. The prosecutor, in fact, demanded the heaviest sentence for him: five years in prison, three of which were closed, estimating that the co-owners had “knowledge of the structural problems” but that they had “played for time” to “spend the most late as possible and as little as possible.
The thorny question of the experts
Concerning the architect Richard Carta, who had appraised the building less than three weeks before its collapse, an acquittal was also requested by his lawyers who confided that the required sentence (three years including two years in prison) “stunned.” Me Cyril Gosset was surprised that his client was being prosecuted and not the other expert, Reynald Filipputti, who had benefited from a dismissal of the case “even though he had known the building for four years”.
His other Parisian lawyer, Me Cyrille Charbonneau, insisted: the role of the legal expert is not to put an end to the danger of a building but to the imminence of a danger. Certainly, he did not propose to evacuate all the tenants but in all cases, it is the town hall which decides.
This Wednesday, the defense of Julien Ruas, who was precisely the deputy mayor responsible for these questions at the town hall then headed by Jean-Claude Gaudin, who died in May and whose shadow hung over the debates, must plead. The decision of the criminal court will be reserved.
