Читать книгу Death of a Traveller - Didier Fassin - Страница 11

It appeared to me that the examining magistrate had not deciphered the problem at the root of this case, and I thought it might be of interest if I contributed here the information resulting from my own deciphering of it.

Fernando Pessoa, Il Caso Vargas

One morning, the sociologist receives an email from a collective that has come together to seek justice following the death of a Traveller. He has never heard of the case. He does not know the three persons who sign the email, all women. They give a succinct account of the tragic death of a thirty-seven-year-old man, the brother of one of them. He was killed by officers from the GIGN, Groupe d’intervention de la gendarmerie nationale, a special unit of the gendarmerie dedicated to terrorist attacks and hostage situations, who had come to arrest him as he was deemed to have absconded because he had not returned to prison following home leave. The three women tell the sociologist that they have read some of his books, and they would like to invite him to participate in a panel discussion focused on ending state violence, as their press release puts it. Moved by the man’s story, sympathetic to the collective’s campaign, and baffled by the implausibility of the official version of the events – all factors that echo other cases in which he has taken an interest – the sociologist nevertheless replies that, unfortunately, as he is not in France, he must decline their invitation. A few moments later, however, he follows up with a postscript proposing to write a short text that they could read at the event if they wish. They accept with enthusiasm. He therefore sends them a few pages in which he reflects on the machinery of law enforcement, penal structures and the prison system in France, where recent developments have led to tragedies such as the one in which this man died. Indeed, this tragic event sits at the intersection of ethnographic research he has been conducting for some fifteen years on the police, courts and prisons. The deceased man’s sister writes a brief message to say that she was touched when she read the text, as since her brother’s death she has been feeling a powerful need to articulate these things but knows that, when spoken by Travellers, they go unheard. She adds that she shared the text with her father, who himself experienced prison from the age of thirteen: after listening attentively he told her that he approved of what it said. The short address is therefore included in the program for the event. A slightly amended version is published a few weeks later on the first anniversary of the tragedy, as an opinion column in a national daily newspaper.

Over the following months, the sociologist continues to receive the collective’s regular press releases. He is thus kept informed about the judicial process, the hopes raised when those who fired the shots are placed under investigation and then dashed when the case is dismissed. He learns also of the marches in memory of the victim and in support of his family, held in the nearby administrative town where the case is to be decided as well as in other places where similar tragedies have taken place. After several email exchanges, he eventually goes to meet with the Traveller’s sister and other members of his family, including his parents, in their village. Spending the day with them, he takes note of the wound that remains open, the anger at a justice system that did not listen to them, the grieving that cannot begin until their words have been heard. Thus is germinated the idea for a book that would respect their version of the tragedy they have lived, and are still living through. The proposal is still unformed, and the support not guaranteed, as he explains to them. But they accept the idea without hesitation. He tells them too that he cannot simply reproduce their view, that he will have to include accounts from other perspectives. And he speaks to them of his scruples about questioning them on such painful events, causing them to relive this traumatic recent past. It hurts to talk about it, they say, but it does us good all the same. In any case, we talk about it with each other every day. Every day we talk about it. A few weeks later, the sociologist writes to the family to tell them that his publisher is willing to publish the book. It is such a poignant day for us to receive that news, replies the Traveller’s sister. Today would have been his fortieth birthday.

Thus begins an investigation, or rather a counter-investigation, that leads the sociologist to interrupt all his other projects for several months. The man’s death and the ensuing criminal inquiry take a forceful hold on him – a sort of ethical urgency that cannot be put off. For, ultimately, this story is a tragic illustration of what has formed the substance of his two most recent books: the will to punish and the inequality of lives. He must once again return to examine the circumstances of this tragic event and the legal proceedings in order to understand what has played out here at both the specific and the generic level. He therefore conducts twelve interviews with the protagonists in the case, explaining his project clearly to each person so as to avoid any misunderstanding. The deceased’s relatives and those involved either closely or more distantly in the events and its aftermath agree readily, as do the judges and lawyers, save one. Conversely, repeated approaches to the gendarmes, both individually and via their institution, both locally and at the national level, yield no result. Likewise multiple requests to some of the indirect witnesses, such as the emergency doctor, and to others having taken part in the story, such as the journalist. Thanks in particular to the diligence of the family and of the public prosecutor’s office, documents are assembled: the five handwritten accounts by the parents, uncle, brother and sister-in-law, made just after the tragedy; the twenty-seven statements of witness depositions; the autopsy and ballistics reports, that of weapon examination, the toxicology and forensic analyses; the record of the reconstruction of the events and of the visit to the scene; the public prosecution’s charges and the defense lawyers’ responses; the ruling that dismissed the case and its upholding on appeal; the fourteen press releases from the support committee and the twenty-eight articles in the regional press. The pieces of the jigsaw gradually come together. Yet gaps remain, owing to questions that were not asked by the investigators, contradictions that were not brought up during the criminal investigation, points of vagueness and approximations in the various versions of the facts, silences and refusals to be interviewed. Thus, a rich but incomplete fabric is woven, in which the record of a deposition can partially fill in for the missing interview with the witnesses concerned.

But the point of this project is not to substitute the authority of the words written by the sociologist for the authority of the words spoken by the judge. The aim is first to do justice to all the versions of the events and then, on the basis of evidence collected, to formulate a plausible interpretation unfettered by the judicial decision. The relationships between the work of judge and that of historian have long been scrutinized, with the aim either of demonstrating the similarities between them or, on the contrary, to warn against a historiography that sets itself up as public prosecutor or defender of characters or events. Some historians have even gone so far as to re-examine court decisions in cases from their own times. In the present instance, there is something of a potential dialogue between the judge and the ethnographer, in which the ethnographer takes the liberty of investigating the judge’s interpretation. A new form therefore needs to be essayed in order to produce accounts that keep as closely as possible to the facts as they emerge over the course of interviews, depositions, field observations and the assembly of other documentary traces, all the while embedding them in descriptions and narratives through a process of re-creation. Composing the text becomes an operation akin to jointing a brickwork of empirical data, using the cement of reasoning and imagination, so as to generate a novel structure of what might be termed an augmented reality. This augmented reality first places readers as close as possible to the experience of the protagonists and then draws them into the counter-investigative work of the sociologist.

But, in order to craft this masonry, the facts need to be tracked down to the smallest detail. Creative freedom is to some extent restricted by the commitment to truth-telling. Thus, when the text says that the officer thinks you never know with Travellers, and that he believes that his was the fatal shot, it is because during his deposition he states that Travellers represent a difficult community for them and, later, that he was probably the one who killed the man. When the text notes that the father thinks the evacuation of the officer was staged to make it look as if he was injured, and imagines that the shots could have led his oxygen bottles to explode and thus transformed his son into a terrorist, these are points made in one of the interviews. Many more examples could be cited, almost line by line. Similarly, the terms employed in the text reproduce as far as possible the words used by the speakers. The gendarmes call their victim the target (la cible), the objective (l’objectif), the individual or the man; they say that they want to neutralize (neutraliser) him, which means to kill him, and euphemistically talk of handling (prendre en compte) his father and his brother when they pin them down and handcuff them. The family uses expressions typically belonging to the language of the Roma to speak of the gendarmes (schmitts, clistés, cagoulés), translated here as cops, whose semi-automatic weapons are Tommy guns (mitraillettes); the lean-to of the house is named a shed (cabouin) or a barn (grange). When referring to the Travellers, the public prosecutor alternates the slightly pejorative noun gypsy (manouche) and the common phrase travelling people (gens du voyage). However, the point is not to incorporate verbal tics, syntax errors or clumsy expressions that would undermine the credibility of the speakers and distract readers. Hence the refusal to use the realist effects of quotation marks and dialogues. Furthermore, it is important to remember that, while interviews do allow access to the words of the speaker, records of depositions are not word-for-word transcriptions but summaries of what the court clerk heard. They thus do not constitute a complete reproduction.

No proper name of any person or, indeed, of any place appears, nor any date. This choice of anonymization arises not only out of ethical concerns to protect the individuals involved or legal considerations to protect the author; both these protections are illusory given that modern search engines make it a simple matter to identify all the details of such an event. Anonymization is used above all as a way to draw out the broader meaning of this death, the conditions of its possibility, the actions of the gendarmes, the practice of judges, the campaign led by the family. Specific though this story is, it nevertheless reveals fundamental features of the state’s law-enforcement institutions and of the punitive treatment of Travellers: it is not merely a regrettable incident. One exception is made to this rule of anonymization: the forename of the Traveller. Refusing to consign him to anonymity is a way of respecting the memory of the person who is, ultimately, the only victim of the events that occurred one day in early spring at his parents’ farm. The fragile trace of a life cut short. An intimate connection through which, for his family, he lives on.

But the plan to render an account of the case in all its complexity soon came up against a major dilemma with regard to the different versions. The problem is the difficulty of recounting the events in an even-handed way. The separate accounts, each one written from a subjective point of view, seek to reconstruct how each person experienced the scene, the events that preceded it and those that followed. This approach inevitably results in the presentation of some experiences that were actually lived and others that were falsified. For whatever one decides about who is telling the truth, the two versions presented, that of the relatives and that of the gendarmes, are irreconcilable. One of them at least is mistaken, and possibly even deliberately false. In order to get as close as possible to subjectivities, experiences should therefore be recounted as they were supposed to have really been lived, including the awareness of deceit, even if this version is radically different from what the individuals concerned said in interviews or depositions. Which effectively would come down to no longer respecting the accounts of the protagonists, introducing from the outset the perspective of an external observer assumed to know what did happen. This is not strictly speaking a moral dilemma, in the sense of choosing the side one thinks speaks the truth (assuming that there is one side that holds this truth). It is simply the logical conundrum of having to reconstruct a scene as if the protagonists had indeed experienced it in the way they tell it, even when they are deliberately misleading their interlocutors. And this has to be done without being able, and without wishing, to decide in advance which of them are telling the truth.

The way out of this dilemma adopted by the sociologist was as follows. In the first stage, he worked on the assumption that all the protagonists were telling the truth, and therefore he adopted their point of view on the basis of the versions they gave. The parallel accounts of the first officer and the father, the second officer and the mother, as reconstructed, are based strictly on the information each of these individuals presented as the truth. This obviously results in entirely incompatible stories. The judicial system chose between them. The public prosecutor in his early statement, and the examining magistrate in her decision, came down in favor of the officers and against the family. The investigation might end there, and this is indeed what almost always happens. But we can also take into consideration the fact that, in the judiciary, not all individuals are treated equally, and not all words are given equal weight, particularly when law-enforcement officers are accused, and also when either the plaintiffs or the accused are Travellers. In the second stage, the sociologist therefore attempted to re-examine the different versions, this time in order to decide whether there were reasons to think that some of them were more consistent than others. He first presented a general discussion of the principles underlying the search for truth and the detection of lies. He then analyzed the different versions, both by drawing out any internal contradictions and improbabilities and by comparing them with the set of external evidence from other testimonies, expert opinions and technical reports. This process resulted in another possible reading of the facts of the case.

In short, the initial intention to give even-handed treatment to the versions of the officers and the family, respecting both equally, did not prevent the subsequent rigorous dissection of the legal arguments and verdict and the presentation of a version based on rational grounds of probability. To venture a parallel from cinema, we might say that the book begins in the manner of Rashōmon and ends in the spirit of Twelve Angry Men. And this twostage process is in fact not unlike the construction of the object of study itself, a criminal case. Indeed, the judicial procedure first produces depositions, which are more or less divergent versions of the facts, then an investigation, which examines all the evidence gathered, and finally conclusions. The method followed by the sociologist, right through to the writing-up of his work, ultimately follows a similar pattern. Hence some repetitions, mirroring the process of the counter-investigation. This process might be called a sociological investigation, in reference to but in contrast with the criminal investigation, because it is not limited to the individuals questioned but expands its interrogation to the social conditions of possibility of the events concerned.

As many studies, in France and elsewhere, have established, decisions taken by the courts reflect the balance of power and relations of inequality within a society, which come into play not only in the way certain people are convicted and others acquitted but also in the way social worlds are represented – in this case, those of the gendarmes and of the Travellers. In other words, they involve the production both of justice and of truth. When the sociologist embarked on this project, he knew that he would obviously have no impact on the former, but he thought he might be able to unravel its connection with the latter while the justice system represents the truth of the courts as the sole legitimate one. His counter-investigation could indeed reveal a different reading of the facts. The point was not to take the side of the vanquished against the victors, as historians sometimes put it – in other words to deem the family’s version more truthful than that of the officers – but to produce an account independent of all institutional links, of all professional affinities and, as far as possible, of any prejudice. The account must derive purely from the application of a dual principle: all voices deserve the same degree of attention, and the conclusions must proceed purely from the correlation of the available evidence interpreted in context.

It was this dual principle that, in the family’s view, the judges had not respected. For the aim of their campaign was not so much to see the officers who fired the fatal shots convicted, though they believed they should be punished in line with what they saw as their level of culpability, as to at last get what they felt was a true account of the conditions in which their son and brother died. An account which, as they put it, would make it possible to raise questions about the police’s methods of intervention, the functioning of the penal system, the political context of law and order, and the social representations of Travellers that, taken together, had made his tragic death seemingly ineluctable.

But, for the sociologist, the reason it made sense to engage in this work went beyond the mere critique of punitive practices to which he had devoted his previous books. By focusing on the events that led to the death of the young man, by granting the accounts of his family equal value with those of the gendarmes, by formulating a version independent of that of the courts, by offering a glimpse of what his life had been like, troubled to be sure, but so different from the defamatory portraits painted by the criminal investigation file and the media reconstructions, by pulling him out of oblivion and freeing him from stereotypes, the sociologist thought that it might be possible to return to him, whatever his criminal past, something of what society refuses Travellers, and that the family, through their campaign for justice and truth, had never stopped demanding: respectability.

He started writing.