Originally Posted by
zambonidriver
In what I believe to be an usual move the court has decided to organise a hearing of the CVR last minutes.
It will happen on Oct 17 behind closed doors (on the judges, lawyers and plaintifs).
This is not so unusual here in France. A criminal trial is primarily an judge-led investigation and analyis of a massive pre-established dossier of relevant information. There are very few exclusionary rules regarding evidence, and usually no direct examination of witnesses (which is all done beforehand by the judicial police). Lawers are there to represent various parties, but their courtroom role is usually just to make suggestions to the judges on the weight of established evidence - they don't get to "cross examine" in the UK / UK sense. So, the CVR recordings are "just" part of the dossier.
Criminal trials here usually have a panel of 3 professional judges, and 6 court-appointed "lay assessors", and various complicated super-majorities are needed to reach a verdict. I'm not 100% sure in this trial if lay assessors are in fact part of the set-up.
Originally Posted by
Bergerie1
MPT, I did say usually. I agree that in some cases legal processes have been helpful. But more often the adversarial methods of the courts tend to obscure the real underlying reasons for accidents, and inhibit the free flow of information as needed for a truly Just Culture.
[See also my reply above]. Worth remembering that court - even criminal - proceedings here in France are not (wholly....) based on the adversarial model, but are a judge-led investigation of an enormous eveidential dossier assembled beforehand by the judicial police.