Page:The Constitutions and Other Select Documents Illustrative of the History of France, 1789-1907, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged.pdf/272

242 253. No person acquitted by a legal jury can be re-arrested or accused for the same offence.

Tribunal of Cassation.

254. There is in the whole republic one tribunal of cassation.

It decides:

Upon the petitions in cassation against the judicial decisions in the last resort rendered by the tribunals;

Upon petitions for removal from one court to another, on account of legitimate suspicion or public security;

Upon the orders of judges and the complaints of partiality of a whole court.

255. The tribunal of cassation can never have jurisdiction over the facts of the actions; but it reverses the judgments rendered upon proceedings in which the forms have been violated or which contain any express contravention of the law, and it sends back the facts of the suit to the tribunal which shall have jurisdiction therein.

256. When after one cassation the second judgment upon the matter is attacked by the same means as the first, the question cannot be discussed again before the tribunal of cassation without having been submitted to the legislative body, which provides a law to which the tribunal of cassation is required to conform itself.

257. Each year the tribunal of cassation is required to send to each of the sections of the legislative body a deputation which presents to it the list of the judgments rendered, with marginal notes and the text of the laws which have determined the judgment.

258. The number of the judges of the tribunal of cassation cannot exceed three-fourths of the number of the departments.

259. This tribunal is renewed every year by a fifth.

The electoral assemblies of the departments select successively and alternately the judges who shall replace those who retire from the tribunal of cassation.

The judges of this tribunal can always be re-elected.

260. Each judge of the tribunal of cassation has a substitute elected by the same electoral assembly.