The luxury of French prisons
Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of the French Republic, has been convicted and sentenced to five years for a ‘criminal conspiracy tied to alleged Libyan funding of his successful 2007 presidential campaign’. For those of us more familiar with Anglo-Saxon criminal law, there’s much to be confused by. France, like many ‘Napoleonic’ legal systems, draws no distinction between determining guilt and sentencing. Both are, of course, determined by the same magistrates or judges. As a result, French courts often hear defendants’ lawyers insist upon their client’s innocence with one breath, before saying that ‘should the judges find them guilty, their sentence should be light because…’. This is all very bizarre to
