Have I become a murder groupie? I must say I can't pass up the "fait divers" / police blotter page of La Dépêche, the regional newspaper here. Helene's lawyer, the great Catala, had an amazing case last year, before Helene's trial. It involved a law professor in Toulouse who was accused of murdering his wife. There was a rival to provide motive, opportunity was there, but where was the body? Circumstantial evidence against the professor was very strong and he was apparently a very weak witness in his own defense. Catala pulled it out with a 5 hour closing statement and the professor was acquitted. The state appealed and another unrelated lawyer won the appeal too.
More recently, a British man was convicted of killing his wife whose body was found years after the fact in a car at the bottom of a lake. He is appealing partly on the basis of the fact that his translator seems to have slept through the entire trial. That reminds me I didn't previously mention the translator that was assigned to Robert.
Her name was Jean and like Mrs Snoutsworthy she grew up in Phildelphia although her accent sounded Midwestern. She was dignified and respectable looking so it was continually surprising how candid she was particularly with Mrs. S. She was slightly acquainted with some of the jurors in the way that anyone who has lived in a town of 20,000 long enough inevitably knows a few people in a room of 12 selected at random.
She was there to translate for Robert but I'm not quite sure why. His French is perfectly decent but maybe parts of his defense were based on misunderstanding court orders written in French. Well, Robert has always felt very aggrieved at the French police and judicial systems and blames it on them that the controversy with the neighbor over water and other things was never resolved. At times his testimony was sarcastic, even belligerent. If the prosecutor asked him a question and he replied no and she asked the same question again, Robert might say something like "What part of no don't you understand."
This is pure Robert. He is proud of being an Armenian and speaking his mind directly. It made his friends cringe. He was ridiculing the same judicial system that was in total control of his and his wife's fate. When he was arrested and jailed for having unregistered guns and for throwing the murder weapon into the woods, he was equally awful toward the juge d'instruction the pre-trial magistrate that had the power to keep him locked up and to set restrictive conditions on where he could travel once released. This judge has pissed off a lot of people by being, in their view, unreasonable and arbitrary and antagonistic. She really pissed off Robert and so did the trial prosecutor.
At the very end of the trial, Robert rose and actually apologized for the "obnoxious things I've said about the court." "Obnoxious" was such a strong word for the circumstances, it almost sounded mocking. Jean the translator first used the adjective "nauseabonde" ("sickening"), then changed it to "desagreable" (pretty much "disagreable.") This was the final instance, but all through the trial she had been really advocating for Robert, trying to soften his strong language and his bitter sarcasm.
She took flack from all sides. Robert got really testy with her at one point and made her change her translation and stop softening his statements. The family picked on her for small inaccuracies which were also mostly, as far as I could tell, also attempts to tone down Robert's belligerence. Finally the judge Foxface admonished her to stop reacting so visibly to the prosecutor's statements belittling and disparaging the defense.
She herself was philosophical about it all. She understood Robert from having been around lots of Armenians growing up in Turkey. This was her first serious criminal case and given the stress and her compassionate nature, maybe it will be her last.
