Who are the judges who will decide Netanyahu’s fate?

Bar-Am’s record on white-collar crime is less extensive than the other two judges, putting him in the neutral category. However, with less experience in this area, he is more likely to defer to them.

By YONAH JEREMY BOB
District Court of Jerusalem (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
District Court of Jerusalem
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)
Who are these three judges who will decide Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fate in his public corruption trial?
Mostly, it is not the panel that Netanyahu would have hoped for. We have already seen this with the court ruling against Netanyahu on a postponement request in March and on his request last week for an exemption to attend Sunday’s hearing.
Sure, the prime minister would have been in an even worse situation if his trial had been set for Tel Aviv – which is one reason his advisers suggested he get indicted as a sitting prime minister, since the law requires that such a trial must be before the Jerusalem District Court).
But from the Jerusalem judges that he could have drawn, Rivka Friedman-Feldman and Oded Shaham are both viewed as on the tougher side in terms of convictions and sentencing.
Moshe Bar-Am’s record on white-collar crime is less extensive, putting him in the neutral category. However, with less experience in this area, he is more likely to defer to the other two judges.
Friedman-Feldman is by far the most prominent, having served on the panel that convicted former prime minister Ehud Olmert in the Talansky Affair retrial.
Though she wrote that she agreed with convicting Olmert, she went a step further, declaring that had she been on the original panel that acquitted him, she would have convicted Olmert even in the first trial.
When sentencing Olmert to jail time, despite the fact that she and the panel expressed appreciation for Olmert’s contributions to the country, they also echoed the prosecution’s points that he must go to jail to restore public faith in the system.
If Netanyahu is ever convicted and must decide whether to express regret, he should recall that Friedman-Feldman and the panel said they were stricter with Olmert because he never “accepted responsibility for his actions.”
Friedman-Feldman was also part of a panel of judges in 2001 that convicted former defense minister Yitzhak Mordechai of sexual harassment and assault. But when a majority of the judges decided to give him only a suspended sentence, she voted with the minority to give him actual jail time.
A high-profile case where Friedman-Feldman voted on the lenient side of a split in a three-judge panel was the case against the murderers of 16-year-old east Jerusalem Shuafat resident Muhammad Abu Khdeir.
In 2016, Friedman-Feldman and another judge voted in the majority for a 21-year prison sentence for two minors who actively aided the primary killer of Abu Khdeir, but did not do the actual killing. The dissenting judge voted for a life sentence for the two minors.
However, this was a case of violence by minors, so it is unclear what implications this would have about Friedman-Feldman in a case of white collar crime by grownups.
Shaham’s most cited ruling on public corruption was when he voted in the minority to convict Likud minister Tzachi Hanegbi of corruption charges, even as the majority of the panel only convicted him of perjury, making him the strictest judge on the panel.
Also, Shaham was in the majority in framing Hanegbi’s perjury conviction as carrying a finding of moral turpitude, which set back his political career for years.
All three judges were promoted from the magistrate’s court to the district court in 2012.
Jerusalem District Court President Aharon Farkash selected them over himself and his three most senior deputies because of a combination of already being committed to other high-profile cases, impending retirement and, in one case, a lack of criminal law experience.
But all of this is prologue.
The real major sign of where the judges stand will be whether they start calling witnesses closer to three months from now, as the prosecution would prefer, or closer to nine months or a year from now, as Netanyahu’s legal team will push for.
For those anticipating an encore that could surpass the Olmert saga, the waiting is over.