Xavier Nogueras and Joseph Cohen-Sabban were prosecuted for being accomplices of one of their client, tried for fraud in judgment. The court found that they had no knowledge that the document provided by their client was a forgery.
“Hello Master.” Joseph Cohen-Sabban enters the courtroom of the Paris court greeted by the police officers in charge of security. At this moment, the professional fate of the renowned criminal lawyer, like that of his colleague Xavier Nogueras, is suspended from the decision which will be rendered a few minutes later by the 11th correctional chamber.
The two lawyers are then still suspected of having produced, during the trial at the assizes of one of their client, the drug trafficker Robert Dawes, false documents favorable to him.
The words of the president of the court are harsh against those who have shown “a most blameworthy casualness and levity”. However, at the end of the reading of her judgment of a little over an hour, Isabelle Prévost-Desprez released Xavier Nogueras and Joseph Cohen-Sabban from the offense of complicity in attempted fraud in the judgment.
“Hateful investigating judges”
However, they were found guilty of “violation of the secrecy of the investigation”, which earned them a fine of 15,000 euros and a three-year ban on practicing the profession of lawyer. A sentence later, the president of the 11th chamber of the Paris Criminal Court specifies that this additional sentence is suspended. A sigh of relief is heard in the courtroom, full to bursting with black dresses come to support their colleagues.
“There was a very serious offence, that of complicity in attempted fraud in judgment, of which I was completely innocent and an offense which exists and which is what it is, everyone will appreciate”, notes Joseph Cohen-Sabban to leaving the audience.
“We had to deal with hateful investigating judges, obtuse prosecutors. I didn’t want to retire before being cleared, I think I was cleared,” he adds.
Tribute to Hervé Temime
Before the opening of the debates, Me Matthieu Chirez, adviser to Xavier Nogueras, stood up in a solemn atmosphere of meditation. “I cannot help but rise to pay tribute to an immense lawyer, Me Hervé Temime, of whom I know, everyone today in his measure suffers from his absence.” “It’s hard but it’s beautiful”, continues the lawyer recalling that Hervé Temime, who died last week, will have pleaded for the last time for “the defense of a lawyer (Xavier Nogueras, editor’s note) and pleaded for the defense of our profession.
In this case, Xavier Nogueras and Joseph Cohen-Sabban showed “genuine dilletantism”, “weak involvement in the defense of their client” and committed “very serious errors and imprudence”. Then in charge of the defense of the British drug trafficker Robert Dawes, sentenced to 22 years of criminal imprisonment by the Paris Assize Court in December 2018 for the importation of 1.3 tonnes of cocaine, the two criminal lawyers had presented documents, provided by their client, aiming to question the procedure. Coins that turned out to be fake.
“blissful amateurism”
At the hearing last January, Xavier Nogueras admitted “having done nothing” in this case, leaving his three other colleagues to take care of the defense of Robert Dawes. Joseph Cohen-Sabban, 70, had pleaded “fatigue”. They had then provided parts covered by professional secrecy to a relative of the drug trafficker, Evan Hughes. “No lawyer concerned about the quality of a client’s defense would have adopted such light and blameworthy behavior”, decided President Isabelle Prévost-Desprez when reading her judgment denouncing “blissful amateurism and negligence”. .
“They have seriously damaged the confidence that each litigant has in the legal assistants”, condemns the judge again.
These “deficiencies” in the defense of their client do not, however, make them guilty of complicity in attempted fraud for the court. Robert Dawes and Evan Hughes, who had falsified the documents, were sentenced to 5 and 4 years in prison.
“In no case can a conviction (for this offence, editor’s note) be pronounced without verification of the intentional element, recalls the president of the court. Nothing in the file makes it possible to establish with certainty that one of the four lawyers , and in particular Xavier Nogueras or Joseph Cohen-Sabban, knew that the documents presented before the Assize Court were forgeries. In other words, they did not “knowingly” provide a forgery and cannot be condemned.
“We said they would postpone the black dress, and there it is, it’s done”, welcomed the lawyers of the two criminals at the exit of the courtroom.
