Contenu du sommaire : Justice(s)

Justice in public
In ancient Greece, the judicial system was publicized, justice being a public action made known to everyone. However, informing the public went beyond publicity, and invited public opinion. At a climactic point in Athens, public opinion denounced the corrupt judicial system. The reply, in Athens and elsewhere, consisted in making justice public, by resorting to unprecedented communication. Although disseminating this information to the citizens served the purpose of justice, it remained exceptional.

Voltaire and the justice of the Ancien Régime : a fraud promoted by the media
Voltaire owes the reputation he has today of a champion of progress in the legal system to his involvement in a few extraordinary cases in his later years, for which he successfully displayed his genius for communication. On these occasions, he painted a dark and inaccurate picture of the penal justice system of the times, one that has since been repeated and blindly accepted. That Voltaire's allegations have never been verified created a grim myth that still today makes us see the general rule where exceptions were described.

Representations of justice in engraving, 1750-1789In the 18th century, the engraving is more and more used as propaganda medium in the great debates which agitate the public opinion, notably in the conflicts about justice between the magistrates of the parliaments and the king. For instance, in some prints about this subject, the allegorical figure of Virtue represents the magistrates, which means the king is not the keeper of Justice ; and the case of the murderer Desrues gives the opportunity of plates about his life and his trial which illustrate and justify the parliaments in their practices and decisions.

Small cases, colorful trials. Court reporters and « la correctionnelle » (1880-1940)From 1880 to 1940, the « tribunaliers », i.e., famous court reporters, sometimes stray away from criminal court reports, and focus on less high-profile courts, in particular the « tribunaux correctionnels » and their sometimes uncanny, pathetic affairs. In those articles, taking a comedic tone to the point at times of bawdy « gauloiserie », they aim to entertain. However, the journalists also denounce, via their chronicles, the operation of the justice system. Indeed, defendants are mainly the unaccounted for, the under-represented – too old, too poor or too young, and the comedy targets circumstances and characters that are unwillingly funny. The « small lawsuits » offer an opportunity to examine the changes of manners in contemporary society and about the purpose of a certain aspect of justice. Here the ribald laughter meets a more satirical laughter.

The dangerousness of child sexual offenders – an invention of the media ?
In the representation of the pedophile, patterns of identification and evaluation have been designed, put aside then reworked by the media, as they accounted for the changing consensus on sex offenders. An emblematic monster for the contemporary world, the pedophile is a construct which owes a lot of its status and definition to the media. A psychiatric concept coined at the very end of the 19th century, pedophilia was left out of the field of forensics until the 1970s, when activism gave it a place within the public space. As soon as the mid-80s, however, the figure of the child molester is reversed, as psychiatrists and the media offer a hybrid representation. Almost equally a (possibly serial) murderer or a child lover, the pedophile is always subjected to uncontrollable impulses. The current representation of the pedophile is part of what seems to be a new consensus in all aspects of the law : all of social defense is dominated by the obsession of danger, and the requirement of the total absence of risk for all individuals.

The impossible secret of court investigation and prosecution
At the crossroad of the justice system and the media is the matter of secrets : investigators and magistrates need a time of secrecy to prepare a case. However, what the legal system is concerned with cannot be kept away from the information given to the public. The legal framework that should regulate this contradiction is not without its ambiguities. What leeway do journalists, lawyers, magistrates and prosecutors have within this complex contradiction ?

Public opinion and criminal justice : an impossible encounter
The visibility of criminal institutions should be criticized for its excesses when it is driven by a utopian idea of security. It makes the professional insecure and generates only populism. But it is also an indication that these systems are part of a democracy. This is why we must address the challenges and apply ourselves to them. From this point of view, the presence of prisons in the public eye is significant). Between fleeting indignation and the quest for true control, this ambiguous presence reflects the difficulty of combining criminal justice and liberal democracy in a society ruled by the media.

The revolutionary trial : birth of a media justice
In 1789, revolutionary Justice becomes one of the most prominent means of democratization and social regeneration. Open to the citizens, the courts become part of the public space. During the revolutionary period, famous trials are thus regarded as events that do not only concern judicial specialists, but the whole nation. In this article, we argue that the Revolutionary period gives birth to an ambiguous relationship between the media and criminal justice : thanks to the growing importance of public opinion in the judicial practices, citizens are now able to control the defense of their own rights. Yet, in the same time, this interference of public opinion and media keeps weakening the independence of justice.

The Nozière case – between judicial investigation and media coverage
This article studies one of the most famous cases of the interwar period (the Nozière case, 1933) with respect to its media coverage and to the relationships between press and justice. Though the media's investigation and judicial investigation differ, the press co-operates with the justice system and seems to be close to it technically (co-operation in the way investigation is carried out) and regarding the content (convergence in the way the mobile and the issue of incest are considered). The article also deals with the issue of repercussions of media coverage on judge work and juries sentences.

The educational staging of the Moscow trials
Forty years after the publication of Annie Kriegel's work on the Moscow trials in the Communist systems, is there anything new to learn about the political-media roles of such parodies of justice ? The continuity between Leninist and Stalinist practices in terms of pedagogy is more obvious. It is now possible to analyze thoroughly the direct involvement of Stalin himself in the staging of the Great Purge trials. But we have also discovered that, in addition to the three « great » Moscow Trials, hundreds of other trials of minor Communist politicians were held on Stalin's orders. This article analyzes the role of these « small provincial trials », their staging, but also the « excesses » that occurred because local officials were unable to anticipate the reactions of the witnesses called upon to participate in this carnivalesque inversion of roles.

Resorting to broadcasting through radio, television and the most up-to-date communication channels available turned out to be a decisive factor for international courts. The online broadcasts of the proceedings of the UN International Criminal Tribunal for former Yugoslavia has set standards that the International Criminal Court tends to follow in spite of its limitations, and go beyond, through new online services. Other new, innovative paths in image management are offered by the Special Court for Sierra Leone.

Questioning the question
The notorious ‘question', i.e. judicial torture, that was part and parcel of the Ancien Régime criminal procedure, which on the eve of the Revolution had become a merely dormant practice having incorporated all the strictures levelled by philosophers and lawyers in favour of a reform of justice, paradoxically became the subject of ‘media hype'as testified by lampoons, leaflets, testimony literature, judicial memoirs, trial accounts and so on. The question became an important issue with public opinion. Some saw tortured criminals as victims of judicial violence, whereas certain magistrates tried to demonstrate that this violence was legitimate and administered humanely to hardened criminals. In this political strife, the recourse to image prevailed since it embodied the fantasies surrounding torture (such as its allegedly ecclesiastical origins), while allowing those defending the King's justice to show a limited and controlled violence.

Dreyfus at the penal colony, or : how political prisoners are broken
When Alfred Dreyfus was condemned to transportation in a fortress outside the continental territory, a sentence which he accomplished on Devil's Island (île du Diable) in French Guyana, a land known as « the dry guillotine », the event had a strong impact on the international public opinion at the end of the nineteenth century. The case even came to symbolize the iniquity of raison d'état which blindly struck an innocent victim. Beyond the personal case of the man who unwittingly became the hero of the Dreyfus Affair, this paper retraces the history of political transportation from the aftermath of the French Revolution to the present time. Whoever the victims of the political repression were, from the Republicans imprisoned in the Mont-Saint-Michel blockhouses before 1830, to their fellow prisoners transported to Belle-Ile-en-Mer in 1848-1849, to those deported to the Marquesas Islands, Guyana, Algeria or New Caledonia between 1851 and 1876, the aim of the condemnation was the same : to scare the prisoners, to destroy their morale and to quell any desire their partisans might have had to imitate them. Dreyfus escaped the death penalty because it was suppressed in 1848, though his transportation to that sinister place off Guyana was deliberately intended to bring about his death. The press were right in describing the horrors of the penal colony, even if they assimilated it wrongly with the hard labor imposed on common law criminals. This paper will focus on the influence of the media in creating a collective imagination of imprisonment.

The irreparable case of Dr Sam Sheppard
In 1954 in the United States, Dr Sam Sheppard was tried and convicted for the murder of his wife despite his continued protests that he encountered an intruder who knocked him unconscious before he could discover his wife's body. Sheppard's story has given rise to two televisions series and a film. Just as the Common Law departs from a conflict between two parties to arrive at a general rule, fictions have found in individual stories a way to incite the public to reflect upon broader questions such as the myth of the innocent man who, alone, must fight against the judicial machine as well as the powerful media.

From the law of December 6, 1954 to the 2005 Linden report : towards a new presence of cameras in the courts ?The law of December 6th 1954 banning radio and television broadcast as well as photography of court debates, aimed at restoring the authority of the legal institution and at raising the moral standards of the French society. However, the chaste veil once agreed upon by the media soon turned into a barrier, as television and its need for images gained an incontrovertible status in the public space. How would the need for transparency of a democracy accommodate itself of the dignity of justice ? The law became more flexible in the 1980s – without, however, any collective consultation. A report of the Linden Committee, still in abeyance, attempted in 2005 to clarify the institutional and cultural stakes of a possible return of cameras into the French courts.