As our colleagues Steven Erlanger and Katrin Bennhold report, “The arrest in New York of one of France’s leading global figures and a possible next president, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, on charges of attempted rape produced an earthquake of shock, outrage, disbelief and embarrassment throughout France on Sunday.”
Though horrified by those alleged crimes, the French press and political elite on Monday seemed perhaps more scandalized still by the images of Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s brusque treatment by the New York police, and his exposure in the American media.
“I found that image to be incredibly brutal, violent and cruel,” the former justice minister Elisabeth Guigou told France-Info radio on Monday, referring to widely published photographs of a beleaguered-looking Mr. Strauss-Kahn, handcuffed and led by several New York police officers. “I am happy that we do not have the same judicial system.”
As justice minister, Ms. Guigou, now a parliamentarian, oversaw the passage of a law prohibiting the publication of photographs of handcuffed criminal suspects.
“I don’t see what the publication of images of this type adds,” she said.
Asked about Ms. Guigou’s remarks, Eva Joly, a well-known French magistrate who once brought charges against Mr. Strauss-Kahn for corruption (of which he was later acquitted), agreed that “these are very violent images.” Ms. Joly, who is now a leader of the French Green Party expected to run in next year’s presidential election, added that this sort of media spectacle might be “more violent for a celebrity than for an unknown person,” but noted that the American justice system “doesn’t distinguish between the director of the I.M.F. and any other suspect. It’s the idea of equal rights.” *
Ms. Joly also suggested that the ‘perp walk’ images of Mr. Strauss-Kahn in handcuffs were a product of a justice system quote unlike the French one, because American prosecutors always needs to think about convincing a jury of a suspect’s guilt. At present, there are no jurors in many French courtrooms, although French President Nicolas Sarkozy has proposed changes that would make juries more common and jurors do take part in trials for the most serious offenses, including rape.
A French radio interview with Eva Joly, a leading French magistrate and potential presidential candidate.
As Richard Brody observed of Ms. Joly’s comments in a post on The New Yorker’s Web site: “the perp walk seems to have no French counterpart. But Joly’s more substantial remarks, regarding the differences between the two countries’ judicial systems, deserves consideration.”
Mr. Brody pointed out that the documentary filmmaker Raymond Depardon’s fly-on-the-wall look at French justice, “Tenth District Court,” from 2004, showed a very different system of justice, “unlike the ritualized theatre of American proceedings.”
The 12 defendants who appear before Judge Mich?le Bernard-Requin and her colleagues for such offenses as drunk driving, marijuana peddling, petty larceny, and arms possession must stand at a podium in the center of court and answer her direct questions. Without a jury to seduce, the defendants wear their usual clothes and speak their mind with a refreshingly contentious frankness
Mr. Brody also points to this trailer for the film, which gives a sample of a very different system in action:
French journalists covering the case in New York were themselves astonished to see Mr. Strauss-Kahn in handcuffs, even in person. “Last night, the chilling image of DSK handcuffed nailed our mouths shut,” wrote Stéphane Jourdain, a French reporter for Agence France-Presse, using Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s initials, his familiar French moniker. “Not one journalist asked him for a reaction when he came out.”
In a column on the origins of the phrase “perp walk,” in 2002, William Safire explained in The New York Times Magazine:
Perp walk burst into print in November 1986; Newsweek reported that Charles Hynes, the New York prosecutor, “refused to parade defendants before cameras in the now-traditional ‘perp walk’ that many prosecutors use to please the TV stations.” The columnist Nat Hentoff, journalism’s foremost defender of civil liberties, wrote that same month in criticism of publicity-seeking prosecutors who “put defendants through what is called in the trade a ‘perp walk’” after alerting camera crews of the parade of supposed malefactors. “Under such circumstances, even Mother Teresa would look extremely suspicious, especially if her hands were cuffed behind her back.”
Robert Morgenthau, Manhattan’s district attorney, informs me that the phrase dates back to the mid-70’s, when he and the TV reporter Gabe Pressman often clashed over the interests of the press and the public versus the rights of the accused. “Gabe said, ‘We need pictures to report your cases,’ and I said, ‘You’re breaking my heart,’” recalls the crusty D.A. “But Rudy Giuliani, when he was a prosecutor, was the master of the perp walk.”
As Mr. Safire explained at the time, even when it does not concern high-profile French politicians, the practice “has come under fire from a minority determined to defend the principle of the presumption of innocence and the rights of those indicted to a trial before an unprejudiced jury.”
The possibility that the parading of Mr. Strauss-Kahn in handcuffs could compromise his right to be considered innocent until proven guilty struck several French commentators on Monday.
“The heart can only contract before these humiliating and poignant images that they’re giving of him,” Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a leftist senator and former minister, wrote on his blog. “A horrible global lynching! And what if it were all a monstrous injustice?”
While acknowledging that Mr. Strauss-Kahn’s alleged crimes are “particularly serious,” Le Monde editorialized in its Monday afternoon edition, “When one of the world’s most powerful men is turned over to press photos, coming out of a police station handcuffed, hands behind his back, he is already being subjected to a sentence which is specific to him.”
“Grave question,” the newspaper continued. “Is it necessary that a man’s fame deprive him of his presumption of innocence in the media? Because if they must assuredly be equal before the justice system, all men are not equal before the press.”
* This post was revised to add more of Ms. Joly’s remarks at the suggestion of readers who suggested that her comments might be misunderstood if not aired fully enough.
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