The two prosecutors finished their indictment. They requested a one-year suspended prison sentence for Eric Dupond-Moretti, the first Minister of Justice to be tried in the exercise of his functions, for suspicion of conflict of interest.
The Minister of Justice is accused of having used his functions to settle scores with magistrates whom he had criticized when he was a lawyer. Present at the hearing, he first asked to be excused for the morning in order to be able to go to the Council of Ministers. “We made sure that I could be present,” he explained to the court on Tuesday.
A Minister of Justice lawyer
During this trial, we found him as a lawyer, letting nothing go – “a request, not an order”, he corrected Tuesday regarding an instruction from his office –, and subjecting all the prosecution witnesses a background sound of exasperated grunts and sighs. “Sorry, I’m a little excited,” he apologized to the court.
Same treatment for the accusation and its “leading questions”: “the mass is said”, “everything is on the charge”, complains the former star lawyer with 36 years of experience at the bar. Over the course of the hearings, he multiplied the long, furious glances – and the angry throwing of notebooks on his table –, turned in the direction of the Attorney General of the Court of Cassation Rémy Heitz.