INTRODUCTION

On July 28, 1978, the French National Assembly passed Loi 78–888. The law changed several articles of the French Code of Penal Procedure governing the selection of juries in the cour d'assise (the tribunal that tries the most serious felonies). Before the law was passed, members of each jury were selected from a list assembled by local commissions. This method had been criticized as elitist, because the commissions tended to favor “respectable” citizens. The new law specified that jury lists would henceforth be composed by random, public selection of names from the voting rolls.

The new law alarmed Robert Badinter, the French lawyer and anti-death penalty activist whose tireless advocacy against capital punishment had earned him the nickname Monsieur Abolition. In his 2000 memoir of the abolition struggle, Badinter described his reservations about the law. A lifelong Socialist, Badinter denied a desire to return to nineteenth-century juries of notables, who were disposed to defend “order and property at any price.” However, he observed that under the previous law, jurors were “discreetly chosen” in a way that favored “professionals, civil servants, and managers.“