Suspended sentences for first-time offenders, reform of sentence adjustments... Darmanin unveils his plan to reform the judicial system

Simple suspended sentences only for first-time offenders, a return to the principle of mandatory adjustment of certain sentences, and an increase in the number of criminal courts without juries: Minister of Justice Gérald Darmanin sent parliamentary groups on Monday the measures he intends to include in his plan to reform the judicial system.

During a press presentation on Monday, the minister detailed the ten articles of this bill, which he hopes to present to the Council of Ministers in the autumn, after having referred the matter to the Council of State for an opinion "in September." "The judges are not lax, but the system has become so," the minister declared. "There have never been so many prison sentences," and yet "one in two sentences is never carried out because it is adjusted directly after the court's decision."

In this project, the Minister of Justice, who had announced that he wanted to abolish suspended sentences and replace them with probation, ultimately proposes to "reserve simple suspended sentences only for people with a clean criminal record," in other words, first-time offenders.

People with a criminal record will no longer be eligible for this measure and will be sentenced to a term of imprisonment. "You can be sentenced to an electronic tag, but it doesn't necessarily mean a prison sentence," Gérald Darmanin said. A suspended sentence will no longer be possible after two years of imprisonment.

The minister also wants to revisit the principle of mandatory sentence adjustments. Since the so-called Belloubet reform of 2020, a prison sentence can be adjusted to up to one year. "Mandatory sentence adjustments have pushed judges to increase the length of sentences" to ensure they are properly executed, said Gérald Darmanin. "We are creating prison overcrowding," he said.

According to the bill, the sentencing judge will have the discretion to adjust up to two years of imprisonment. However, the sentencing judge will not be able to subsequently modify the sentence imposed by the court.

Gérald Darmanin also plans to reinstate prison sentences of less than one month, which were abolished by former minister Nicole Belloubet to combat prison overcrowding, and to ensure incarceration in the event of non-payment of day fines.

Two final articles concern criminal justice: one provides for the extension of the guilty plea procedure, currently possible for certain offenses, to felonies, provided the victim agrees. The other proposes extending the jurisdiction of departmental criminal courts (CCD) to cases judged on appeal and to cases of repeat offenses, currently devolved to the assize courts. The Minister of Justice also wishes to increase the number of CCDs, currently limited to one per department.

Generalized in 2023 despite direct opposition from the legal profession, the CCDs were intended to relieve congestion in the assize courts by entrusting professional magistrates, rather than juries, with the first-instance judgment of crimes punishable by fifteen or twenty years of imprisonment, mostly rape. But they are criticized for having the opposite effect.

"The philosophy of this reform is to go further in the prison system," Justine Probst, national secretary of the Magistrates' Union (SM, left-wing), told AFP. She is skeptical about the reform's ability to curb prison overcrowding. "We are seeing the disappearance of a certain number of mechanisms that allowed for the individualization of sentences," she also lamented.