Balkany trial: was there a "journalistic relentlessness"?

DEBATE

This is an argument made by the defense of Balkany couple to explain the severity of the judgment against Patrick Balkany, sentenced Friday to four years in prison for tax fraud, and his wife Isabelle, sentenced to three years in prison without immediate imprisonment, unlike the mayor of Levallois-Perret: according to one of their lawyers, Eric Dupond-Moretti, the couple would have suffered a "journalistic fury" from "a pack" during this trial.

In Culture Médias sur Europe 1, Tuesday, L'Obs journalist Mathieu Delahousse, who covered the trial for the weekly, and lawyer Antoine Vey, one of the couple's lawyers, discussed this formula used by the penalist in C L'hebdo on France 5 : did the media play their role in this trial? Was it wrong to film the mayor of Levallois-Perret arrive in prison? Do journalists have an influence on the sentence?

Isabelle Balkany, "main actress" of the "media game"?

"The pack is not wild, inconsistent, it has followed an event of justice," Mathieu Delahousse replies to the famous lawyer. "What Eric Dupond-Moretti describes, it happened in a very rigorous way.It puts forward a form of media savagery, which has existed in this file: but what is the media balance between the word of Isabelle Balkany and the words of the judges who sentenced her All the antennas are open to her but in front of her, there is in fact no one.

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Isabelle Balkany, precisely, was not tender with the media on her return to Levallois-Perret: "I returned very quickly to the town hall, there was a pack of voracious cameras and microphones. "These are keyboards that make an indecent surge of life, which throw everyone into pasture," she criticized BFM TV.

"In what case did we see a person sentenced rushing so fast in front of all the cameras without being contradicted sometimes on the bottom? She has her defense but there is also a media game of which she is the main actress", defends the journalist, also author of Cash Cash, investigation of illegal cash circulating in France .

An "ill-regulated" interaction between justice and the media

"It's their right to try to manage their communication as they see fit," says Antoine Vey. "The relationship between the justice that has no right to communicate and the defendant who would have the right to do so is distorted: there are communiqués from the National Public Prosecutor's Office quite regularly, with a communication officer at the public prosecutor's office. 'media stakes has become something very important.'

Antoine Vey, Balkany's lawyer, explains at @PhilippeVandel's microphone, that there are poorly regulated interactions between the press and the justice system that make defense sometimes difficult #Europe1pic.twitter.com / AKxB7ctdHn

And according to Antoine Vey, this media issue collides with judicial time: "There is this ill-regulated interaction between the press and the justice, to the point that it becomes very difficult to defend when we have around us the media system" he regrets on our antenna, referring to the multiple reports broadcast at the same time as the trial, as was also the case for the trial of the tragedy of Cuba Libre.

Health images "ruin" the job of journalist

The media, guilty of having increased the judgment against the mayor of Levallois-Perret? Mathieu Delahousse evokes a "two-room trial" and a properly filled role: "The press did its job, we do not have to be ashamed of our handling of the Balkany trial," he says. On the other hand, "it is necessary to make the lawsuit of the social networks", responsible for having carried a considerable lot of insults and antisemitic remarks, points the journalist.

At the microphone of @PhilippeVandel, @Math_Delahousse explains that we must dissociate the treatment of the press and that done on social networks. The press does not have to be ashamed of its handling of the trial # Balkany # Europe1pic.twitter.com / YmPieSwBwa

The two men join however on their criticism of the images, abundantly diffused, showing Patrick Balkany arrive at the Paris prison of the Health. "Seeing a man in prison, in no system, we can not rejoice," says the lawyer, joined by the journalist: "Go filming running against health is a method that we [the journalists of the judicial press] interrogates and spoils the job a little bit. "