Суд мести

There are enough questions here to set anyone's head spinning. For example, because of the procedural violations described here, none of the expert examinations could be treated as conclusive. The Gorins still need to be regarded as missing, not necessarily dead, and Pichugin cannot be regarded as the killer. All such questions should be, and usually are, seen by the judge as being in the defendant's favour. Unless the judge's name is Olikhver.

Chapter 7
Evaluating the evidence

The events surrounding the expert examinations would not have boosted the prosecution's confidence: too many opportunities for Pichugin's lawyers to ask awkward questions. In a proper court of law, questions like those could lead to the charges being dismissed. So the prosecutors and all the machinery backing their case decided to target the defence team.

The plan was to discredit them a little, to make their arguments in the future trial less convincing.

Not long before the trial got underway, the prosecution asked the court to restrict the defence lawyers' access to some of the evidence. The purpose of this was to cast doubt in public on the integrity of the lawyers and Pichugin himself.

I tried to find out more about this episode from the prosecution. Nothing doing. But this is what defence lawyer Georgiy Samoylovich Kaganer has to say: "They well knew that we'd finish examining the evidence at the end of May. They had no grounds to do what they did, of course. We officially notified the court that we'd complete our perusal of the case on 28 May. Then suddenly the prosecution wanted a deadline of 4 June applied to us! It's like returning a book to the library on 28 May and being told you'll be fined if you don't bring it back by 4 June!"

This is a well-known trick. The prosecution was trying to tell the public that Pichugin and his defence team were playing for time and trying to extract some kind of concession. It also accused them of not spending enough time reading the files, which they have been doing from 10 o'clock to 5 with an hour for lunch.

Kaganer: "In reply to that, I set out our daily routine. We'd arrive at Lefortovo at 9:30 and be given a room to work in by 10:30 at the earliest. At 12:40 they'd take the defendant off for his lunch, officially till 2. But in practice we'd be let back into the room at quarter to 4 and the room would be taken away from us at quarter to five. I went to see Pichugin every day to study the evidence. It worked out as two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, sometimes a little more. If the documents were printed, Aleksey would get through 100 pages in that time. But things slowed down drastically when we got to the handwritten documents. This was when the prosecution kicked up a fuss. They chose a day when he was trying to examine papers in poor handwriting and accused him of only reading 30 pages a day and deliberately dragging things out. I showed them our schedule and how we were getting through 50 pages a day on average. I explained that it was impossible to read more than 40 pages of handwritten text in 4 hours. We still managed to finish on time, but the Basmannyy Court, which is made up of former prosecutors, ignored us and imposed a deadline anyway."

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