“Perpetuity is to turn off the light, it is to turn off hope”, reacted this Wednesday, June 29 on franceinfo, master Marie Violleau, lawyer for Mohamed Abrini, sentenced to life imprisonment with 22 years of security. He was found guilty of complicity in murder and attempted murder by the special assize court in Paris. “It’s still a life sentence, a life sentence, it’s not nothing, it’s extremely heavy, it’s complicated to take for the one who is in the box and for his lawyers too”she added.
What is your first reaction to this verdict against your client?
It’s still a life sentence, a life sentence is not nothing, it’s extremely heavy, it’s complicated to take for the one who is in the box and for his lawyers too, it’s always complicated to get up and to go to him [Mohameb Abrini] put your hand on your shoulder.
>> >> LARGE FORMAT. The historic trial of the attacks of November 13 in 50 moments of hearing
There is this security sentence which goes with the life sentence. We could have taken 30 years of security, we could have had a much heavier sentence. The fact that he does not take the maximum in a file like that with 132 deaths and an emotion such as we know it and that we have felt throughout these months of hearing. It may mean that there is still hope and that we will use it during the trial in Brussels. [attentat de 2016], it may mean that we had heard that he still had things to say. Life is something that for defense lawyers is very embarrassing. Perpetuity is to extinguish the light, it is to extinguish hope.
How can we analyze this verdict for the civil parties in particular?
There are civil parties who must be relieved, there are also defendants who must ask themselves lots of questions and we have to manage all that. It’s a tough night for everyone. What is certain is that we will go to prison on [Mohamed Abrini] see tomorrow [jeudi] with the motivation sheet which is at our disposal. We will analyze this decision. There is the quantum of the sentence but there is also what he is condemned for. It’s not just a criminal qualification otherwise we wouldn’t have spent ten months discussing all this.
How did you get through a trial of this magnitude?
There is the individual side, our job is first of all to defend a single person, Mohamed Abrini, he is the one we will see on Saturday, Sunday in detention, the one we have on the phone on evening when he enters the cell. It’s the one you stand next to in court. These are his interests first. Then there is the fact of not forgetting that we are part of something common, collective because of the number of victims with facts that have affected the whole of France. Perhaps we too, defense lawyers, must participate in the manifestation of the truth and we are part of this collective progress. We are not here only to challenge the arguments of the court and the civil parties, the prosecution. We are also here to move forward together. On these two axes, we tried to build a defense.
Do you think we have heard enough from the accused?
We heard the defendants, the only thing I feared from the start was that this artificial division of the hearing extinguishes the spontaneity of each other. In any trial at the criminal court or at the assizes, people stand up and react to the statements of one or the other and that’s what makes a hearing live and we didn’t have it too much because that it was a large prefabricated room, with microphones where we had to hear that we were given the floor. Maybe that killed that spontaneity, we would have liked them to react from time to time and maybe that would have brought us something, I’m firmly convinced of that. It killed the beauty of a criminal hearing, the beauty of the oral nature of the debates. She wasn’t perfect, she wasn’t complete.