The president of the Bar, patron of the lawyers of Nîmes, ordered this Wednesday afternoon and until Friday the silence of the black dresses in the hearings of the judicial court and the court of appeal. A very rare measure that originated in a conflict at the Assize Court of Gard…
It is an important criminal file which opened on Monday and which was to last until the end of this week before the Assize Court of Gard. A case of “extortion with a weapon”, “recidivism of violence”, and “recidivism of theft with violence, or even “criminal association”. Seven defendants are referred to the Gard jurors, but only six are present, the last implicated is not found. Five men and a woman are therefore facing the jurors.
But a conflict broke out on Monday at the opening of the proceedings, with a court-appointed lawyer who was insulted by his “client”. An investigation is underway and legal proceedings are being considered, as the accused even spat in the direction of his lawyer in the courtroom. Immediately, the lawyer victim of the actions of his client refused to represent the accused and the President of the Bar Aoudia entered the scene to defend his colleague. She self-seized the criminal file…”Because everyone has the right to be defended even this man who attacked my colleague. But I ask for the referral of the case so that I can study this voluminous criminal file, but also because of my ordinal obligations“, she believes.
A defendant who is involved in several home-jackings that occurred in the Gard in Meynes in particular, but also in the Bouches-du-Rhône during the summer of 2020, with families attacked in their homes, and people attacked in the streets. Thefts of jewelry, victims beaten up, savage attacks, these are the offenses for which the gang from a sensitive district of Marseille is accused, with the exception of a young woman living in Nîmes.
After the insults and spitting against the Nîmes criminal lawyer, the court therefore studied the dismissal of the trial requested by the president of the Bar Aoudia. But the Assize Court finally decided to continue the proceedings in accordance with the requisitions of Advocate General Mondon: “This case should be remembered for victims awaiting trial. In this case, the accused acknowledges his participation“, emphasizes the Advocate General. The representative of the General Prosecutor’s Office was afraid that in the event of a postponement of the trial, the defendants, in the future, will use this method to postpone other cases.
Following this decision by the Assize Court to refuse to postpone the trial, the patron saint of lawyers in Nîmes, Maître Aoudia, drew up a little-known and very little-used system, that of “the ban on the bar”. Concretely, she prohibited as chairman of the bar the lawyers present from pleading before the assizes. “Due to the violation of the fundamental rights of the defense, I was obliged to strike the bar of the Assize Court of the interdict to plead“, she underlined on Monday… The lawyers are therefore present at the hearing, but cannot intervene to defend their clients, and even the civil parties! Mute lawyers during a criminal hearing, a method used in four times over the past few decades, which is therefore in progress at the Nîmes courthouse.
But that’s not all. The trial continued without the intervention of the black robes on Tuesday and again this Wednesday despite new requests for dismissal demanded by President Aoudia. This Wednesday noon, the tension rose a notch and the situation became even more difficult when around sixty lawyers had taken over the courtroom to support the president of the bar. Faced with a new refusal to postpone the trial, Maître Aoudia prohibited the 400 Nîmes lawyers from pleading before all the courts of the Gard capital, that is to say before the judicial court and before the court of appeal. Until Friday, you will therefore come across silent lawyers who are prohibited from pleading at the courthouse. Many cases, especially in the criminal court, therefore risk being dismissed by this extremely rare use of “prohibited at the bar.”
B.DLC
