Prosecutors consider that penalists Joseph Cohen-Sabban and Xavier Nogueras missed their duty of vigilance and independence from their client, Robert Dawes, by making themselves accomplices of attempted scam.
by Pascale Robert-Diard
In their indictment, supported Thursday, February 2, the two prosecutors defined the major issue of the trial for “false in public writing” and “attempt to swindle judgment” which has been held since January 23 before the criminal court from Paris. He does not relate to the drug trafficker Robert Dawes or his henchman, Evan Hughes, but of the two lawyers prosecuted by their side, Joseph Cohen-Sabban and Xavier Nogueras, and poses, beyond them, the question Duties of penalists in the face of judges and that of their independence from their customers.
The fate of the fifties “Drug Lord” was quickly settled by the accusation. Against Robert Dawes, who purges a final conviction of twenty-two years of criminal imprisonment for the importation of 1.3 tonnes of cocaine, they requested five years of firm. A three -year sentence was requested against his acolyte, absent from the hearing, accompanied by an international arrest warrant. The two men, according to the accusation, “designed a machine to trap justice” by falsifying documents from the file submitted to the Special Assize Court before which Robert Dawes appeared in December 2018.
But on the defense benches, as on those of the public where several lawyers of the Paris bar had taken place, the faces frozen at the announcement of the violence of the sentences required by Julien Goldszlagier and Eric Serfass at the ‘regard for their colleagues: three years of imprisonment, two of which are closed against Joseph Cohen-Sabban, two years, one farm against Xavier Nogueras, assorted by the measure that both feared the most, Five years of prohibition on professional practice. Be nothing less than the final exclusion of his profession for Joseph Cohen-Sabban, 69 years old, after forty-six years of bar, and the jeopardy, in the middle of his career, of the dress of Xavier Nogueras, 42 years.
“Is this case a lamentable sinking or an unpredictable avalanche? The prosecution takes the side of the sinking,” observed Eric Serfass, before posing the terms of the debate according to the accusation: “We are here to defend a Cause: that of loyalty, independence, and procedure. The procedure is the only path allowed to us to build a judicial truth. We do not have the right to take another. And the Lawyer cannot use the procedure to give credit to a false piece or to a piece on which he would have doubts “, a fortiori” in a very great crime. “
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