The High Court of Justice decided Wednesday to issue a three-week injunction against implementation of the plea bargain agreement signed by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz and former President of Israel Moshe Katzav.
A five-judge panel headed by Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch gave the prosecution 21 days in which to justify the plea bargain it had fashioned. The plea deal drops all rape charges and includes no sexual felonies. Instead, Katzav is to plead guilty to lesser charges of sexual misdemeanors.
The plea bargain, which must be approved by the court, could be scuttled if the prosecution cannot convince the court it was justified. The court intervention is seen by some as a slap in the face to the Attorney General. If the bargain is annulled, it would be the first time that the Supreme Court interfered in this way in the Attorney General's decision-making.
President Beinisch grilled prosecution attorney Shai Nitzan about the plea bargain and asked him why the prosecution could not have charged Katzav with the offense of "consensual forbidden intercourse" in the case of the woman who worked in the President's Residence. This law in the Israeli penal code makes it possible to convict a man for having intercourse with a female subordinate even if she participated in it willingly or initiated it.
Nitzan said that the woman – known by the initial Aleph – had "told us about forcible rapes and se
A Katzav attorney said that the decision would hasten the decline of the entire Israeli legal system.
nt us to [interview] her friends, but they said that she had told them of a passionate love affair." When Nitzan said that the prosecution feared there was a high chance of an acquittal if it pressed forward with severe charges, Beinisch cryptically retorted that his job was to assess the chances of achieving a guilty verdict, not the chances of an aqcuittal.
Two of former President Moshe Katzav's lawyers, Avi Lavi and Avigdor Feldman, told reporters that the plea bargain in the case is not yet dead.
"We respect the decision by the court, which is interested in hearing further explanations of why the plea bargain was struck," they said: "We believe that one cannot deduce from this regarding the final decision, and that at the end of the day the court will find that the arrangement is proper and balanced and will not intervene in the Attorney General's decision."
However, a third attorney for Katzav, Tzion Amir, was visibly angry as he left the court, and said that the decision would hasten the decline of the entire Israeli legal system.
An attorney for "Aleph", Kinneret Barashi, said that the High Court had "opened the gates of justice before us," and Tziona Kenig Yair of the Women's Lobby - one of the petitioners to the High Court - said the decision was a historic one.
Meretz MKs Yossi Beilin, Ran Cohen and Zehava Gal-On were the first politicians to comment on the High Court's decision to stay the plea bargain between former President Moshe Katzav and the prosecution.
MK Beilin called upon the prosecution to "check itself thoroughly and decide if it is willing to continue to stand behind the deal."
MK Cohen called the High Court's decision "dramatic" and said that the Attorney General now has no choice but to draw the necessary conclusion, that the plea bargain is not reasonable and improper, and should be hidden away and forgotten as soon as possible." MK Gal-On, too, called upon Mazuz to dump the bargain.