Word: floriot
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When aerial hijackers delivered Moise Tshombe to an Algerian jail this month, his wife turned to one of the few men who might have saved her husband from extradition to the Congo-and almost certain death. Parisian Lawyer René Edmond Floriot, 64, faced appalling odds: the Congolese had already convicted Tshombe of not only treason but also murder and robbery. With eloquence, Floriot contended that the Congolese had actually amnestied Tshombe last fall. But last week he lost...
...Algerian Supreme Court, "Algerian justice does not shield murder and robbery." If President Houari Boumediene ratifies the Court's decision Tshombe must go home-presumably to his doom. For the best-known avocat in the French-speaking world, it was a rare, bitter defeat. In 20,000 cases, Floriot has lost only two clients to the guillotine and about ten to the firing squad...
...most spectacular murder trial (1960), Floriot defended Swiss Lawyer-Politician Pierre Jaccoud, onetime dean of the Geneva bar. Police had the murder weapon; witnesses insisted that Jaccoud had shot and stabbed the father of a man who had stolen his mistress. But Floriot harried the witnesses into damaging concessions about the murder weapon, wrung lurid testimony from the mistress. He airily dismissed Jaccoud's lack of alibi: "Only criminals have alibis. Intelligent people never remember how they spend their evenings." Jaccoud got seven years...
...unsympathetic courtroom, Rene Floriot, one of the best and most expensive of Parisian criminal lawyers, delivered a marathon defense oration that ended with "Mais non, all I am trying to say is that you cannot find a man guilty on this kind of evidence." Swiss newspapers fumed at French journalists who suggested that Jaccoud was being railroaded because he had blemished the reputation of conservative, Calvinist Geneva. Students angrily burned copies of Paris-Match on a city square...
...jury was out for a total of three hours, found Pierre Jaccoud guilty of "simple homicide" and sentenced him to seven years' imprisonment, less the nearly two years he has already been under arrest. French lawyers sneered at the verdict as "a typical Swiss compromise." Lawyer Floriot, arriving in Paris, protested: "If my client was guilty, he should have received a much heavier sentence; if not, he should have been liberated...