#4
Newsday
March 24, 2002
Russia Slow to Adopt Jury Trial Process
By Liam Pleven
RUSSIA CORRESPONDENT
Moscow - Irina Pevcheva sat in the drab cage that holds the accused in a Moscow courtroom this month, charged with arranging the brutal ax murder of her mother almost three years ago, as a judge read aloud the following words:
"Guided by the presumption of innocence, you are obliged to interpret all irremovable doubts in favor of the defendant," said Yelena Snegiryova, addressing the seven women and five men who formed a jury of Pevcheva's peers.
The speech would not have been read in the former Soviet Union, which dispensed justice from above through judges who followed the instructions of the ruling Communist Party. In 1993, Russian reformers re-introduced jury trials - which had existed toward the end of czarist rule - in an effort to advance basic civil liberties and limit the enormous power of judges and prosecutors.
But the jury revolution has come piecemeal. Almost nine years after the first post-Soviet jury trial, only nine of Russia's 89 regions allow juries, in part because they are expensive to implement. Only defendants accused of murder or a few other crimes may request them. And even with juries, acquittals are rare.
President Vladimir Putin has called for establishing a a strong civil society - in his words, a "dictatorship of law." He signed bills last year that will implement a jury system nationwide starting in January and that shift the power to issue arrest warrants from prosecutors to judges.
The creeping adoption of jury trials reflects the pace of evolution in a judicial system still stacked against the accused. "Such cultural work is slow," said Sergei Pashin, an attorney who helped draft the 1993 reforms.
Juries have wrought some changes, legal experts say. Police now conduct more professional investigations, aware that they may have to convince a jury, rather than a judge, of a defendant's guilt. Investigators now "actually write down the names of the witnesses," said Alexei Shurygin, a judge on Russia's supreme court.
Juries have "had an effect, even in places where they haven't been introduced," said Alexander Kolpakov, one of Pevcheva's defense lawyers.
Russian juries have authority to ask for mercy for defendants they convict, which limits the sentence a judge can impose. In Pevcheva's case, the maximum penalty would generally be 20 years - or 15 years with mercy.
Defendants have a slim, but slightly better, chance of winning acquittal from a jury. Russian juries deliver convictions roughly 85 percent of the time, according to Supreme Court statistics, compared with a rate of more than 99 percent in verdicts by judges.
Convictions after a jury trial rise to more than 90 percent after figuring in appeals by prosecutors, which can result in repeated trials. "I know cases where defendants have gone to trial four times," said Pashin.
By comparison, 70 percent of defendants charged with violent felonies in New York last year were convicted, according to the state Department of Criminal Justice Services. And American prosecutors cannot charge people with the same crime after they have been acquitted by a jury.
As the jury system is set to go nationwide, some Russians resist, preferring the country's Soviet-designed non-jury system, in which judges deliver their verdicts with two ordinary citizens acting as court-appointed "people's assessors".
"If they introduce it, we will work on it. But in my personal view, the present system of people's assessors works rather well," said Nikolai Zaitsev, court chairman in Krasnoyarsk, a Siberian region.
This month, Pevcheva, 27, the mother of a 4-year-old son, stood accused largely on the basis of statements that police took from two co-defendants who were younger than 18 at the time of the killing. At the trial, Pevcheva uncomfortably shared the defendants' cage with the two young men.
The prosecution said Pevcheva quarreled with her mother, asked the teens to kill her and gave them and another man, Pavel Rybalko, cash, jewelry, a TV and other goods, all worth about $200. Rybalko lured Lyubov Petrova to a stairwell and, while the teens acted as lookouts, he killed her, the prosecution said.
The youths said in court that police had beaten them to get the statements that implicated Pevcheva. In a statement, Pevcheva said she had learned Rybalko had killed her mother over a debt, but had not gone directly to police because she had been threatened. Rybalko, who had confessed to the killing, said nothing about Pevcheva being involved.
Only about a third of eligible defendants opt for a jury trial, many fearing they cannot be acquitted under any circumstance, preferring to plead guilty to a judge because that can elicit a more lenient sentence. But Pevcheva asked for a jury, her husband said, because she had real hopes of acquittal.
After Pevcheva's jurors deliberated for two-and-a-half hours, they returned to the court and the foreman, a middle-aged man with dark hair and silver sideburns, read her verdict: guilty. The jury recommended mercy.
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