Fear Rules In Russia's Courtrooms

Alexander Melikov was stripped of his judgeship in December in the powerful Moscow City Court.

"Some people say, 'Look what the court chairmen are doing, they terrorize disagreeable judges,' " Lebedev said in an interview on Russia's NTV channel this month. " . . . This is all wrong."

Public confidence in the justice system remains low. Dmitri Kozak, a presidential adviser who spearheaded judicial reform efforts for Putin, acknowledged in a recent speech to judges that Russians believe that "truth is impossible to find" in the system.

In Russia, the conviction rate in criminal cases heard by judges is around 99 percent, according to the administrative arm of the country's Supreme Court. The rate has persisted since the early 1950s, the last years of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, when the work of judges and prosecutors was automatically reviewed if a defendant was acquitted. Before 1951, about 10 percent of defendants were acquitted in non-political trials, according to Sergei Pashin, a former judge and a professor at the Moscow Institute of Economy, Politics and Law.

In some courts, there simply are no acquittals. In 2003 and in the first nine months of 2004, two district courts in Moscow that heard a total of 4,428 criminal cases had no acquittals, according to court records. Officials at the courts declined to comment on the statistics. In the regional court in the southern Russian city Krasnodar, no one has been acquitted in the last 10 years in cases heard by judges, court officials said.

"Judges think of themselves as soldiers in the front line fighting crime," said Sergei Tsirkun, who was a prosecutor in Moscow for 10 years and in that time never lost a case. "A judge is not going to pass an acquittal unless he is absolutely, 100 percent confident that someone is innocent. If he has the slightest suspicion that someone might be guilty, he will find them guilty even if he has to ignore problems with the evidence."

In jury trials, which were introduced in 1993 in nine regions and expanded nationwide in 2003, a defendant is more likely to be found not guilty, with acquittal rates of around 15 percent, according to Supreme Court statistics. In Krasnodar, for instance, where judges find everyone brought before them guilty, juries find 20 percent of defendants not guilty.

"At least a jury trial cannot be compared to the nightmare of an ordinary trial before a judge," said Sergei Nasonov, a professor of criminal law at the Moscow State Law Academy who has written a book on jury trials in Russia. "In a jury trial there is hope for justice and there is no hope in an ordinary trial."

But jury trials represent about 8 percent of all criminal trials, and acquittals are often appealed, overturned by the Supreme Court and sent back for retrial with a fresh jury, according to law professors and defense lawyers. In some cases, prosecutors obtain a guilty verdict after two or three jury acquittals.

Moreover, there is increasing suspicion that the selection of jurors, particularly in sensitive cases, is not always random, as required by law, according to Nasonov and other legal experts.

Judge Melikov, a veteran of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, worked as a criminal investigator for the Interior Ministry before becoming a judge in 1997. He received lifetime tenure in 2000. Melikov said he first knew he was in trouble with his superiors in late 2002, a few months after the introduction of the new criminal code, when he refused to issue an arrest warrant for a robbery suspect because the police had failed to follow new procedures.

At a meeting of judges, Melikov said, their superior, Yegorova, publicly criticized him. Yegorova, who is head of the Moscow City Court, said at the gathering that judges should automatically issue arrest warrants, Melikov said.

Yegorova, who did not respond to a faxed request for an interview, was appointed in 1999 by the Kremlin over the objections of some senior city and federal judges, including Lebedev, the chairman of the Supreme Court, according to Russian media reports quoting a letter from him.

Yegorova, the wife of a general in the FSB, the domestic successor to the KGB, has been accused of pressuring subordinates in certain cases and not tolerating acquittals or lenient verdicts. In her first year in office, 17 judges resigned from the Moscow City Court, most from the criminal courts, according to the Independent Council of Legal Experts.

"We all left because of this atmosphere, which Yegorova created," said Viktor Kononenko, who retired as a judge from the Moscow City Court in 2001. "She wouldn't accept our methods of work. People with whom I worked, some very experienced, were told to move cases along quickly without observing the legal norms. We weren't judged on the quality of justice in our courtrooms."

Melikov decided to fight when the judicial authorities sought to remove him and 12 other judges in 2004; most of the targeted judges retired. Melikov said he was offered a resignation package that would have entitled him to retain his pension.

In the hearing before the judicial disciplinary body, Melikov argued his case for about three hours, saying that in some cases, his allegedly poor decisions were not contested by prosecutors or were upheld by the Supreme Court, information Yegorova omitted in her motion.

But the disciplinary body took less than five minutes to find for Yegorova and remove Melikov from the bench.

This past week, Melikov began his appeal, which could take several weeks to complete. It is being heard in the Moscow City Court, which is headed by Yegorova.