The Verdict

All Geneva last week was absorbed in the final days of the trial of Pierre Jaccoud, 54. The former dean of the Geneva bar, a power in cantonal politics, a man of wealth and breeding, Jaccoud stood accused of a brutal and almost senseless murder: shooting and stabbing to death Charles Zumbach, 62, whose young son had captured the affections of Jaccoud's longtime mistress, pretty Linda Baud, 38 (TIME, Feb. 1).

Attired in his morning coat, Attorney General Charles Cornu, 70, rose for his final summation against the defendant, in whose home he had been a frequent guest. Cornu first explained haltingly that he had not really been Jaccoud's "friend," and that their relationship had always been "professional." Looking at the emaciated defendant, Cornu then charged that "this charming, intelligent, celebrated lawyer, this great man of politics, was an abject criminal who shot and stabbed a defenseless man."

In an 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.

The 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."

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