In Russia, Juries Must Try, Try Again

By Kim Murphy

Sept. 30, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

ASTRAKHAN, Russia — When a bomb killed eight people at a busy marketplace on a steamy summer afternoon here five years ago, police quickly solved the case, as they often do with spectacular efficiency in Russia.

A composite drawing of a mysterious woman seen at the market that day was distributed, and a local drunk who vaguely resembled her was soon arrested. One of her former lovers was hauled in next, and then a few ne’er-do-wells he knew.

Soon the police had four confessions -- all pointing the finger at a wealthy businessman who prosecutors say ordered the bombing to scare off elderly competitors.

The jury didn’t buy it, finding the businessman’s claim that he had been set up by police for refusing to pay bribes much more plausible. All of the defendants were acquitted in late 2003. In a country with no double jeopardy clause, a second trial began 11 months later, but that ended in a mistrial. So did a third. A fourth jury again acquitted the suspects. In April, the Supreme Court upheld the verdict.

But it’s not over yet.

Prosecutors have announced they are petitioning for a new trial with the presidium of the Supreme Court, the highest judicial panel in Russia. The businessman, Magomed Isakov, has come to believe that he will simply be tried until he is found guilty.

“When they acquitted me the last time, I thought my heart would stop,” Isakov said in an interview at his home, to which he returned this summer after more than four years of on-and-off imprisonment. “The whole courtroom was crying, even the jurors.

“But I’m sure they will keep appealing. The police, the prosecutors got so many awards for this. Lots of people were decorated for solving this case. They don’t want to stop.”

More than a decade after the Soviet-era judicial system was overhauled, jury trials in Russia are still a work in progress.

Panels are selected in an opaque process that sometimes produces juries with visible links to the security services. Jury instructions and verdict forms can be worded to leave no realistic alternative but conviction. On the other hand, bribery and threats are still so much a part of the Russian justice system that no one can guarantee that jurors are not being influenced to acquit the guilty, legal experts say.

It has been a slow transition from the Soviet-era judicial system, in which there were no jury trials and courts largely carried out the will of the government. Of 1.1 million criminal cases tried in Russia last year, only 600 were decided by juries; the institution will not be fully in place nationwide until 2007. Jurors acquitted defendants in 18% of the cases they decided. Defendants tried by judges were found not guilty in 3% of the cases.

Under laws allowing jury acquittals to be set aside in cases where serious legal violations occur during trial, the Supreme Court last year reversed 46% of the acquittals and ordered new trials.

Russian jurors are growing increasingly vocal, especially those who may have spent months hearing evidence in a case only to see their acquittal reversed by what many see as a flimsy pretext by the prosecution.

Earlier this year, the Novaya Gazeta newspaper published an open letter to President Vladimir V. Putin from members of two juries that had considered the case of two Moscow businessmen charged with fraud and smuggling. Jurors decided the case had been triggered by business rivals.

The first trial ended in a mistrial after some jurors said they had been offered bribes to convict the defendants, the letter said. The second jury acquitted the men, but the verdict was appealed. In January, the defendants entered their fifth year in custody by going on trial a third time.

After the acquittal in the second trial, the jurors complained, “the prosecutor opined that ‘Russia wasn’t ready for jurors.’ Well, she is entitled to her opinion. But there’s a constitution, and there are jurors like us who don’t think so at all.

“Dear Mr. President, can you please explain why this prosecutor wasn’t fired after declaring that ‘the jurors freed smugglers’? Or is it really the prosecutor who makes the decision on whether the defendant is guilty? If so, why did we spend eight long months studying all the smallest details of this case, and why did we vote for the verdict?”

Defense lawyers and legal experts said jury acquittals most often result not from renegade juries, but from poorly prepared police investigators and prosecutors unaccustomed to having to make a real case. Another factor, they said, is a public so familiar with police abuses that it tends to believe defendants when they say they were forced to confess.

“Before jury trials, our courts have always been on the same side as the prosecutor’s office,” said Sergei Nasonov, who has studied jury trials as a member of the Independent Council of Legal Expertise. “The idea of admissible evidence entered the court system only with the introduction of jury trials. And prosecutors found themselves in a completely new situation: having to convince the jurors that the defendant is guilty.”

Here in Astrakhan, a historic city on the Volga River near the Caspian Sea, the caviar mafia vies with the import-export mafia for power and money. Chechens and Dagestanis have flooded in from the neighboring republics, bringing many of their old intramural animosities with them. A bomb in a marketplace here would immediately have too many potential perpetrators to count.

Perhaps that’s why it took a big coincidence for police to crack the case of the bomb that went off on Aug. 19, 2001, not far from a small kiosk Isakov operates as part of the lucrative empire he controls in the Astrakhan bazaar. Isakov, a migrant from the rough, mountainous republic of Dagestan, had bought into the market as a shopkeeper years before and risen to prominence, controlling several sectors and employing hundreds of workers.

Prosecutors said Isakov had ordered cohorts to plant the bomb to scare off elderly freelance traders who were selling their wares on the sidewalk outside his kiosk and force them to pay rent inside the part of the market he controlled.

Isakov countered that he was being set up because he had made an obscene gesture at a powerful police official who, in league with a gang of criminals operating in the market, had approached him shortly before the bombing for “protection” payments.

“They said I paid $2,000 in order to blow up a bomb to remove those old babushkas from the sidewalk. Tell me, why couldn’t I have had my security approach those babushkas and simply tell them to get out?

“But no, I had to blow them up, and at the same time damage my own kiosk? How can I even think about it? It’s absurd,” Isakov said over tea in his sprawling, three-story house.

His codefendants say they were coerced into confessing through beatings and, in one case, electric shock. “They would work on me. Then they would approach the operations officer who’s in charge of my cell, and say, ‘OK, we didn’t manage to get the right answers,’ ” said Alexander Shturba, accused of being the bomb builder.

Viktor Gordeyev, who served on the first jury, said jurors didn’t find the prosecution’s case believable.

“As the case went on, we began to feel that these defendants could not possibly have done what they were accused of,” Gordeyev said.

Rumiya Mukhamedzhanova, head of the state prosecutions department in Astrakhan, said there was “substantial” evidence against the defendants. The number of acquittals in jury trials, she said, can be ascribed in part to inexperienced investigators and prosecutors, but also to more nefarious factors.

“There is the possibility of influence on the part of the defendants toward the jurors,” she said. “When jurors are leaving the courthouse, they’re without any supervision. And it’s not a big problem to track them down, find out what transport they were using, where did they go, find out where they live. This is being used by some lawyers, and as a result, it can affect jurors’ verdicts.”

In the fourth and most recent trial of Isakov and his codefendants, she said, two jurors reported that relatives of the defendants had approached them at their homes and “urged them to take a decision in favor of the defendant, while using some threats.”

Those jurors resigned and were replaced with alternates. But prosecutors argued in their latest appeal that the other jurors might have been intimidated. The appeal also argues that defendants illegally made statements in front of the jury that they were beaten into confessing. Under recent Russian court rulings -- hotly contested by outraged defense lawyers -- such statements are inadmissible, prosecutors pointed out.

“They can appeal to the Lord Almighty if they want to, but I’m 1 million percent sure that these people are not guilty of this crime,” said Isakov’s lawyer, Nodar Duishvili, whose law partner was shot to death in Astrakhan while working on the case. The slaying has not been solved.

“But this is how the system in Russia works. The judicial system has merged with the law enforcement agencies, the police, the prosecutors, the FSB [Federal Security Service], they work together as a single system, and it doesn’t matter whether a person is innocent or not.”

Svetlana Zaonskaya, foreman of the jury in the third trial, said she thinks she knows why her panel was disbanded before it reached a verdict.

“When the court realized that we thought all of them are innocent,” she said, “they simply dismissed our jury.”

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