(This is a follow-up posting.  Part one can be read here.)

Yesterday, the man behind one of the most infamous and heinous hate crimes in France was sentenced to life in prison. Youssouf Fofana, the “Brain,” as he calls himself, of the “Gang of Barbarians,” was convicted yesterday in Paris juvenile court, aside 26 co-defendants, of masterminding the 2006 extortion plot that resulted in the torture and murder of a young Jewish man, 23-year-old Ilan Halimi.

There was an atmosphere of spectacle surrounding the Palais de Justice, where the verdict was handed down.  A line of riot police stood before the courthouse, while at the Place Dauphine at the rear of the building news teams jockeyed for position. The resolution of the two-month trial has been hotly anticipated, as the media has been excluded from the closed-door proceedings. The case has been discussed ad nauseum, of course, but details of its hearing have been scant.  Instead, we’ve been treated to anecdotes leaked from the courtroom of Mr. Fofana’s outrageous behavior—throwing shoes, taunting the victim’s family, threatening the jury. What’s more, ever since his incarceration, and most decidedly after the fact, Mr. Fofana has begun styling himself as a sort of al-Qaeda-inspired radical, though indications are that his primary motivation for the crime was money.  Fofana and his cohorts have already admitted to targeting young Jewish men because they believed Jews were rich and the community would pay for their release.

Much of the coverage in the wake of the verdict has highlighted the apparently lax sentencing of the other defendants in the case, in particular the leniency shown to two of Fofana’s lieutenants, who were directly involved in the jailing and torture of the victim.  Prosecutors had asked for 20 years for the men, but they received 18 and 15 instead.  What’s more, the “bait girl,” who lured Mr. Halimi to the site of his abduction, received just nine years, in lieu of the 10-12 requested, because she was a minor at the time of the crime.

More inexplicable has been the excessive concern shown for the privacy of the two juvenile defendants, who were 17 at the time of the murder.  This runs against the grain of current French criminal reform, which has been moving in the other direction, towards trying older juveniles as adults.  In fact, the Parisian prosecutor could have split the proceedings and tried the juveniles separately.  It remains unclear why all 27 defendants required a private trial. (We can only speculate…).

The French press has mostly treated the closure of the trial as a procedural matter.  However, the mother of the victim, Ruth Halimi, together with representatives of the Jewish community and the advocacy group S.O.S. Racism, has been outspoken in her demand for an open hearing. Francis Szpiner, the family’s lawyer, blames the culture of silence that reigns in the ethnically concentrated housing projects of the Parisian suburbs, like Bagneux where Mr. Halimi was ultimately found handcuffed to a tree, for enabling the kind of anti-Semitic hatred that motivated his killing.

A public accounting of the crime might have put the “Barbarians’” brand of hatred on trial.  Instead, we only learned indirectly that Mr. Fofana finally confessed on the stand to the burning and fatal stabbing of Mr. Halimi, something he had previously denied.  But other questions remain unexplained. Why, for example, did they torture Ilan Halimi, if money was their ultimate aim?  Certainly the Halimi ransom photo published in the French magazine Choc bears an uncanny resemblance to the photos of Daniel Pearl taken by his captors.  It bears exploring to what extent these crimes might have emerged from a similar worldview.

To be fair, it should be noted that French law often privileges public order over openness. But when it comes to certain issues, sometimes this can make for an orderly silence.

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