Pushing hard to win, that’s what Piet Doedens did in court. Do everything you can to avoid a conviction. This sometimes led to great irritation of the counselors, friend and biographer Cees Koring recalls. In a large drug case, the vice president expressed his annoyance to Doedens: “If you continue like this, you can leave.” The answer: “Can I bring my client with me?” Koring: “With such a remark and the laugh that followed, he made up for everything.”
Piet Doedens died on 15 July at the age of 79, last Friday the funeral was private. His life was actually over for the last fifteen years, say friends and former colleagues. In October 2007 he suffered a severe brain haemorrhage, which left him paralyzed. In recent years, Doedens hardly wanted to see anyone. He couldn’t bear the fact that the shine of his life had disappeared and ultimately opted for euthanasia.
The lawyer started his career in 1973 with Max Moszkowicz Sr. and went on to become one of the country’s best-known criminal lawyers, at a time when few lawyers were really serious about this. Doedens achieved one of the great successes in the Zaanse fitting room murder in 1984, which revolved around the murder of clothing saleswoman Sandra van Raalten. He showed that bicycle repairman Rob van Zaane, who was initially sentenced to twelve years in prison, was innocent.
Doedens regularly assisted well-known professional criminals. It was a different time, remembers friend and colleague Jan Boone, who together with Doedens the IRT affair which revolved around controversial investigative methods against organized crime. “We traveled all over the country to win business. Our customers came to bring us cash, that was still possible back then. Piet was sometimes so careless that he forgot that he had put those banknotes in a file. We were running around the office looking for the money.” „pete”, says Boone, was very sociable outside the courtroom and extremely intelligent in it. “He would sometimes role-play with me in court. Then I had to interrupt him because he had a plan to confuse the judge. And it worked, he was that smart.”
File knowledge
According to lawyer Jan-Hein Kuijpers, who learned the trade from Doedens, Doedens’ great strength was his knowledge of files. “He always had only a very small bag with him, because he thought: if your papers do not fit in that bag, you should read the file again.” Kuijpers received exactly such a bag from Doedens in the late 1990s, and he still uses that bag and the lesson.
Also read an interview with Kuijpers about his teacher Doedens
According to Kuijpers, his teacher was a pioneer who did everything to win a case. He was one of the first lawyers to sometimes call dozens of witnesses. “It was a time when crooks sometimes bugged the police. Of course that was not allowed, but Doedens taught me that it is the job of a lawyer to use information obtained illegally, so to speak, if it is true. When the chairman then asked him: ‘Mr Doedens, how did you get that information’, Doedens said: ‘I was on the train, then I dropped my pen, and it was suddenly under my seat.’ That was very unconventional. Piet Doedens has changed the legal profession.”
Also read this portrait: The criminal justice stuntman
anchor point
But in the end the man who always wanted to win found that he had lost to life. After the brain haemorrhage, he missed his anchor point: the courtroom. At the end he barely got out of bed, Boone and Kuijpers hadn’t seen him for a while. Biographer Cees Koring does. “I had made a podcast in which former judge Frits Lauwaars told how Doedens argued for a huge deprivation of the table. I made him listen. I wanted to show him: you were one of the greatest lawyers in the country. The smile that broke out on his face is the most beautiful legacy I can have.”