It's all over: Robert got off with three years, all suspended except for the four months served in pre-trial detention. Helene got 12 years which, for reasons I don't begin to understand, will actually mean she will have to serve only about three years more than the 2 1/2 years in her pre-trial detention. Mrs Snoutsworthy and I are zombies today after four very late nights. The marathon trial lasted from Monday to Thursday, from 9am to anywhere from 8pm to 11pm.
It's hard to digest it all. It comes back in disjointed episodes. The epic waiting on the first day to be sequestered in an unused court room, 14 of us. Dorian pretending to be a judge. Alix too, choosing to condemn me to a long sentence for having shoe laces that didn't match. Helene's family hanging out in strategically self-selected knots. Her mother completely silent: we thought she was going to try to get Helene off by blaming Robert but if she did I never heard about it. Her father looking pained since he was said to have given damaging depositions to the police which he now had to perhaps try to soften. Thomas, a very warm and handsome who looked a little like Jim in Jules and Jim who had been a neighbor that Helene had taken under her wing. He came all the way from Paris and used up all his vacation days. Rob, who had been our host when we first came to this area and stayed in his gite. It was Rob who had introduced me to Robert so many years ago. I guess I got him back for it, because I was the one who suggested to Robert that he get Rob as a character witness.
 |
| L to R: the parti civile lawyer representing the murdered man's family, Robert's lawyer Maitre Mercadier and the illustrious Maitre George Catala, the F. Lee Bailly of France (CLICK TO ENLARGE) |
The second day was far and away the most harrowing for it was then that we watched a video recording of the murder itself. The courtroom had two or three huge flat screen monitors and the chief judge, Foxface, ordered the clerk to run the tape from the furthest off surveillance camera at the Niestes' property. Gendarmes arrived, the Niestes opened the gates to them, long pause, gendarmes get back into their car and drive off. Long terrible pause. Helene comes up to the gate and rings the bell. Her water supply had been cut off by Nieste and she and Robert had an easement in their deed to repair and maintain the supply even though it was on Nieste’s property. Nobody came to the wrought iron gate; Helene kicked it. It was a huge gate maybe 20 feet wide and 8 feet high. She looked very small against the gate. Before long, there was Robert energetically yanking up a hedge newly planted in front of the chain link fence. The victim showed up gesticulating at Robert. Robert whacked him with the rootball of a laurel plant. The man, always standing on the far side of the low fence, on Nieste’s property, punched Robert in the face. Robert pushed him out of the way for he was there to pull up plants, drive his tractor through the fence and restore his water supply.
Pretty soon Robert and Helene walk back to their house a hundred yards away, concealed by trees and vegetation. The victim never stops waving his arms around; he is obviously shouting and very upset. Helene comes back alone: Robert has had one of his attacks and is taking a dose of oxygen in his bedroom, then he will go behind the house for the tractor. Helene is wearing a jacket and when she arrives near the victim, they are both clearly spewing invective.
You have to realize that the camera is just far enough away that you can easily identify the actors in the tragedy without seeing their faces, let alone blood or brains. The focus isn’t terrific either and all of this along with the utter dropdead silence makes it very much like watching a nightmare made into a movie.
The victim throws a good sized rock at Helene, who is blind in one eye and she says she panicked about losing her good eye. Helene suddenly has the Colt .38 out and is holding it with two hands like a TV policeman would do. Before too long, the victim crumples up like a pile of laundry on the ground. Helene walks off at a normal pace. Soon she comes back, looks at the pile of laundry, then walks off again.
Judge Foxface orders the camera to be reversed to do a freeze-frame sequence. Then it’s wonderful! The victim jumps up, Helene backs up, everything is great. She didn't kill him at all! No police, no gray ugly prison in Agen. No weeping children spread across the Lot, Paris and LA. Helene didn’t lose her mind and destroy her life and the dead man’s and mortify both families and their friends. It must be that Helene and Robert, unable to resolve the war with their Dutch neighbors, sold their house and moved away! They must have decided that they were wasting their whole lives fighting this neighbor who they thought was torturing them and ruining their lives for more than 8 years.
But NO, damn. The movie goes back on forward again and once again, sure enough, she shoots him and again he crumples into a pile and I really do write her dozens of letters to the prison in Agen and visit her there.
I watched the jurors a lot and tried to read them—did they feel pity, did the cute woman with short black hair have a crush on the athletic guy at the end? I watched Judge Foxface a lot. He looked like if George Bush were clever and wily. He often rolled his eyes or looked impatient or did something else seemingly prejudicial that would have led to a mistrial in the US. Especially when Robert would testify about how the French police and legal system were utterly inept and worthless, never helped solve the problem with the neighbors. You could never accuse Robert of buttering up people even when they have the absolute power to ruin his life.
Day three
We missed the first part of the third day where all Robert’s weird arsenal of guns was discussed by firearms experts. They said all the police were fascinated because they are all fellow gun nuts. I guess Robert always had a bunch of pistols, rifles and even assault rifles but I never knew it nor did his kids. That’s so like him to collect. He probably has at least 12 chainsaws not to do professional logging but just to dice up some firewood from time to time. After the firearms weapons experts, there was a numbing array of police hashing over the details of the day of the murder.
We missed the first part of the third day where all Robert’s weird arsenal of guns was discussed by firearms experts. They said all the police were fascinated because they are all fellow gun nuts. I guess Robert always had a bunch of pistols, rifles and even assault rifles but I never knew it nor did his kids. That’s so like him to collect. He probably has at least 12 chainsaws not to do professional logging but just to dice up some firewood from time to time. After the firearms weapons experts, there was a numbing array of police hashing over the details of the day of the murder.
There were also any number of psychological reports and psychiatrists testifying. This really drove home how utterly different the Anglo Saxon and the European legal systems really are. The European system is called inquisitional and involves giving the judge and the prosecutor the task of getting to the very bottom of the crime. That seems to mean starting with when the accused person was born, their toilet training, sex life, etc. In addition then to facing the public with your misdeeds, you have your whole psychological makeup and personality on display from your earliest childhood. And too, this may have been an anomalous case in that nobody needed to waste time on arguing guilt or innocence on account of the video.
The chief judge Foxface very often examined witnesses or else just invited them to spontaneously testify. Next he allowed in turn the victim's lawyer (yes the victim is a party in his own murder trial), prosecutor, and finally the defense lawyers to ask questions. Always in this order. But none of the lawyers asked many questions of anyone; most of the questioning was done by Foxface.
The chief judge Foxface very often examined witnesses or else just invited them to spontaneously testify. Next he allowed in turn the victim's lawyer (yes the victim is a party in his own murder trial), prosecutor, and finally the defense lawyers to ask questions. Always in this order. But none of the lawyers asked many questions of anyone; most of the questioning was done by Foxface.
Day four
The fourth day was mostly closing statements given in the usual order: the dead man’s lawyer first, then the prosecutor, then Robert’s lawyer, then Helene’s.
The dead man’s lawyer, the Codger, was an older comb-over kind of guy with a row or two of military medals on his robe.
Oh, did I mention that everybody wore robes with “bavettes” (bibs) at their throat and clumps of rabbit fur stuck to their backs? Bave means drool by the way. After a while you took them for granted but given the fulsome style of oratory in the closing statements, I kept expecting someone to use his bavette to sop up stray flecks of saliva.
 |
| Maitre Catala's bavette |
The Codger had asked witnesses so few questions it was easy to forget he was even there. That’s why it was so startling when he got to his feet and delivered his final statement in passionate and flowery oratory. He repeated over and over again that while the dead man had no chance for a final scream, we should all hear in our minds the sound of his wife’s scream as she first saw him lying on the ground. It was a moving speech, but he gestured in strange ways, clawing the air in front of his face with his fingers and putting the flowing wings of his robe to good purpose. He allowed his voice to quaver and he would descend from a shout to a whisper. These would seem to be part of the range of conventional gestures for the others all used them too. His speech lasted 45 minutes or so seemingly without notes.
Next up was madame l’Avocat Général whom I thought of as the Devil Woman. She and the chief judge had identical crimson robes while the others wore black. Her job was to summarize the testimony in a way that reflected negatively on the defendants and to propose a penalty for each. She is a tall woman with very short gray hair and half-glasses. She had the most irritating manner of speaking, ending each phrase in a soprano flight toward the falsetto. She too gestured strangely with her arms like some dread eagle of doom stretching before flight.
She went on for almost three hours in a speech full of scorn and mockery for everything and anything that would mitigate or attenuate. Helene and Robert are narcissicists who believe that they and not the police or courts are the ultimate arbiters of right and wrong. Robert had made various antagonistic and demeaning remarks about her almost each time he stood up to testify and now it was her turn to pay him back. She portrayed him as a man at war. This would seem like hyperbole except for the fact that Robert had a collection of pistols and rifles that included assault rifles. I never knew about this collection but it shouldn’t have surprised me in a collector like Robert. Nobody mentioned that he also has an absurd number of chainsaws, for instance.
She mimicked 13 year old Dorian who had been able to find little to say at the bar except, in a quavering voice, that he wanted his mother back.
I know this will sound disloyal, but a lot of her devastating indictment against Robert and Helene rang true for me. I was not the only friend who tried to convince them that they should surrender in the war, sell the house, and spend their lives on something more interesting than fighting a couple of hateful old Dutch people. It seemed crazy to think that anybody had the right to crash through someone’s fence even to exercise a legitimate deeded estment to maintain a spring line.
As for the murder itself, I did not believe Helene was afraid of this man on the opposite side of a fence putting out her remaining good eye. I think she was horrendously angry and aggrieved and felt she was entitled to take a life. That’s why in a way it wasn’t so crazy committing this terrible crime knowing both that two women were watching and also that it was being filmed. Helene said she was afraid her one good eye would be put out but that seems unlikely. She had every opportunity to just flee from a man on the other side of a fence. Helene also said she went out there with the idea of protecting her husband.
The Devil Woman said that for Robert and Helene “it was me, me, me,” and in a way she was right. But they aren’t as simple as that either: these two people are completely generous as friends and normally willing to admit if they are in the wrong. There is no one you’d rather have in your corner.
In any case, she asked for a 15 year sentence stating that a life sentence would be "disproportionate." This gave me the We're-no-longer-in-Kansas jolt: a prosecutor acknowedging that a sentence could be too long? Still, it was a crushing amount of time for a woman in her 40s with three children.
Robert's defense lawyer gave a brief speech with no clawing of the air, very modest. He has a very local accent, very endearing to me hearing him pronounce the word for dog as "chieng" He glanced at the clock a couple times to make sure he wasn't running on and on.
Finally, the great Catala gave his oration. Catala is one of the most famous lawyers in France. He hails from Tolouse where he recently got a law professor acquitted on murder despite mountains of circumstantial evidence against him. (The woman's corpse was never discovered.) Everyone said it was his 5 hour oration that swayed the jury so I was looking forward to this. He is a good orator: he has an excellent quaver, good transitions from shouts to whispers, fine air clawing skills. But this was a tougher sell than even with the law professor. He couldn't conceivably ask for acquittal when we had just watched Helene pull the trigger twice. So he maundered on about her unhappy childhood and how this home was more important somehow to her than a home is to the ordinary mortal. And the drugs and alcohol. He resorted to charm at the end, saying "If you can hear my little music" then take it easy on the sentence. In the end, to my amazement, he asked for less than 10 years sentence! Again that jolt: why didn't he ask for time served?
In any case, she asked for a 15 year sentence stating that a life sentence would be "disproportionate." This gave me the We're-no-longer-in-Kansas jolt: a prosecutor acknowedging that a sentence could be too long? Still, it was a crushing amount of time for a woman in her 40s with three children.
Robert's defense lawyer gave a brief speech with no clawing of the air, very modest. He has a very local accent, very endearing to me hearing him pronounce the word for dog as "chieng" He glanced at the clock a couple times to make sure he wasn't running on and on.
Finally, the great Catala gave his oration. Catala is one of the most famous lawyers in France. He hails from Tolouse where he recently got a law professor acquitted on murder despite mountains of circumstantial evidence against him. (The woman's corpse was never discovered.) Everyone said it was his 5 hour oration that swayed the jury so I was looking forward to this. He is a good orator: he has an excellent quaver, good transitions from shouts to whispers, fine air clawing skills. But this was a tougher sell than even with the law professor. He couldn't conceivably ask for acquittal when we had just watched Helene pull the trigger twice. So he maundered on about her unhappy childhood and how this home was more important somehow to her than a home is to the ordinary mortal. And the drugs and alcohol. He resorted to charm at the end, saying "If you can hear my little music" then take it easy on the sentence. In the end, to my amazement, he asked for less than 10 years sentence! Again that jolt: why didn't he ask for time served?
The jury went off to deliberate. The jury consists of 9 lay jurors, 2 alternates and, weirdly, the three judges who conducted the trial. That means that there are 12 people voting on guilt or innocence and on the penalty. It takes a majority of 8 to convict so we were hoping for 5 sympathetic jurors. I was anxious about where they would draw the line on premeditation since if they found premeditation there could be a life sentence. In the end, perhaps they just compromised between the 15 and the 10 years and arrived at 12.
So Helene has already served 2 1/2 years. With time off for good behavior, she might only be subject to 3 or 4 years. There even may be widespread pardons issued if a socialist is elected president of the Republic of France in 2012.
There was an odd interval after the sentence was pronounced: civil damages were awarded and it was perhaps more for this than anything else that the murdered man's family decided to hire a lawyer and become a parti civile. The Codger mumbled a hundred calculations and came up with sums for this and that that amounted to around 200,000€. This was in the end reduced to about 120,000€ ($160,000)
In the end, I can't help loving Robert and Helene both and I'm not the only one. While awaiting the verdict we were allowed a few minutes visit with her one by one. Helene's friends and I could easily see that all the many police and guards were fond of her. Robert was his usual perky self leaving for home after the verdict, full of his intelligent and perceptive wisecracks. The loveable Fred, Robert's huge Armenian friend all the way from LA, lumbered along having sat through 4 long days and evenings of argument of which he understood not one single word.
