Alexei Gaskarov on Bolotnaya Square, Moscow, May 6, 2012
Alexei Gaskarov Denied Parole Grani.ru
June 17, 2016
Novomoskovsk City Court in Tula Region has denied Bolotnaya Square case convict Alexei Gaskarov’s request of parole, Gaskarov’s wife Anna Karpova [sic] reported on Snob.ru.
“Novomoskovsk City Court Judge Irina Sapronova turned down the request. The spokesman for the penal colony also testified against the request, because Gaskarov had been reprimanded for not greeting a penal colony employee in March,” wrote Karpova.
According to Karpova, the penal colony gave Gaskarov a negative character report. The report noted that the convict had been issued two disciplinary reprimands in solitary confinement and two in the colony for violating the daily routine and not greeting wardens.
And yet the report states that Gaskarov has not violated the internal code of conduct or the terms of his sentence, has been working at the colony and taking part in social activities, has qualified as an electrician, and has been studying to be a welder. Gaskarov has received two commendations for hard work and good behavior. He is polite with the wardens, neat, has a positive effect on new inmates, attends events, and has no outstanding writs of enforcement, the report states.
Gaskarov was arrested in late April 2013. On August 18, 2014, Judge Natalia Susina of the Zamoskvorechye District Court in Moscow sentenced the activist to three and a half years in a medium-security penitentiary facility under Criminal Code Articles 212 (involvement in rioting) and 318.1 (use of non-threatening violence against a state official).
Gaskarov was found guilty of tugging police officer Pavel Bulychev’s arm and police officer Igor Ibatulin’s leg. Gaskarov claimed he tugged Bulychev’s arm to break a police chain that was causing the crowd to stampede. He attempted to pull Ibatulina away from a detainee lying on the ground.
Gaskarov himself was severely beaten at Bolotnaya Square on May 6, 2012, sustaining lacerations to his head. And yet the Russian Investigative Committee refused to file criminal charges in response to his complaint.
On November 27, 2014, a panel of judges at the Moscow City Court (with Tatyana Dodonova acting as reporting judge) left the antifascist’s verdict unchanged.
On June 24, 2015, Novomoskovsk City Court Judge Elena Gorlatova denied Gaskarov parole, citing an outstanding reprimand he received while still in custody at Pretrial Detention Facility No. 5 in Moscow.
Alexei Gaskarov was born in 1985 in Zhukovsky, Moscow Region. A graduate of the Government Finance Academy, he worked at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2010, he was arrested and charged during an investigation of the campaign to defend the Khimki Forest but was acquitted the same year.
Translated by the Russian Reader. No thanks to anyone for letting one of Russia’s finest young men rot in prison for the crime of acting like a decent human being in a horrible situation deliberately provoked by the police. Photo courtesy of bolotnoedelo.info. Read my previous reports on Alexei Gaskarov’s case and the futile efforts to free him.
The latest hearing in my criminal case took place in Maykop from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. on June 17 of this year. This time, the prosecution’s last two witnesses were finally questioned, albeit by a videoconference link with the Soviet District Court in Krasnodar. Vyacheslav Potapov and Vitaly Isayenko were supposed to answer questions about the operations of the website For Krasnodar, on which the article “The Silence of the Lambs” was posted.
It seemed to me that Sergei Shvetsov, senior deputy prosecutor of the Republic of Adygea, was not prepared to examine the witnesses today and the questions he asked them sounded like childish prattle. Even the judge noted this and advised the public prosecutor to concentrate. Ultimately, however, the second public prosecutor, Inessa Orlova from the Maykop City Prosecutor’s Office, took the microphone from Shvetsov and asked the witnesses specific questions.
I was personally interested in Isayenko’s responses to two sets of questions, first, about the circumstances of his interrogation on December 12, 2014. On that day, after the search [at his house], he was brought from Krasnodar to Maykop and interrogated until evening. It was night when they sent him back home to Krasnodar. As Isayenko, who suffers from Type 1 Diabetes, explained, he spent almost half a day at the Republic of Adygea Investigation Department with no food and, much more dangerously, with no insulin. They gave him only water. And yet they interrogated him intensively, trying to squeeze testimony against me and Vyacheslav Potapov, editor of the website For Krasnodar, from him. I was being interrogated in the next room, and I could hear Senior Investigator Kirill Kustov screaming at him. The stress he underwent and the long period he endured without food and insulin landed Vitaly Isayenko in the hospital the day after his return from Maykop. His diabetes flared up and he suffered from other ailments.
I was also interested in Isayenko’s comments, as a computer specialist, on certain statements in the inspection report on the computers seized at Isayenko’s house, an inspection carried out by Senior Investigator Kustov on the night of December 12, 2014. In particular, the report states that three processors were discovered in one of the computers. Isayenko explained there had been only one processor in the computer. He did not know nothing about any other processors.
In general, the witnesses said nothing new. They only confirmed what was already contained in the minutes of their interrogations.
Valery Brinink (left) and his attorney, Andrei Sabinin. Maykop City Court, June 17, 2016
After the witnesses were examined, my attorney, Andrei Sabinin, attempted to request that Elizaveta Koltunova, a linguist from Nizhny Novgorod, be examined via videoconference, but the prosecutors objected, and Judge Vitaly Galagan did their bidding. Our request to examine the linguist by videoconferencing was rejected. According to the defense, this stance on the part of the prosecution and the court contradicts the adversarial nature of judicial proceedings and the principle of the equality of arms.
Much more unexpected and even amusing was the procedural action, which took place after lunch, of obtaining handwriting samples and a signature from prosecution witness Mugdin Mossovich Guchetl, a resident of the village of Gabukay. Everything would have been alright if the witness had simply produced his signature in silence, but instead he recalled another circumstance that I think gave the prosecutors a slight shock. Guchetl recalled that in February of last year, when Investigator A.S. Rudenko of the Investigative Department of the Republican Investigative Committee’s Teuchezsky District office took Guchetl’s written testimony, he asked him to sign blank sheets of paper, because, as Rudenko explained, allegedly, he would later type out Guchetl’s handwritten testimony on the computer, but he needed the signatures right away so he would not have to make a return trip to Adygeisk.
The investigator thus clearly violated the procedure for processing interrogation reports, a procedure strictly regulated by criminal procedural laws. At the same time, the investigator committed forgery by inserting things Guchetl did not say into the report. Today, after reading the interrogation report, which is part of the criminal case file, Guchetl categorically stated he did not say to the investigator what was written in the penultimate paragraph of his printed testimony, which reads as follows: “I want to clarify that I strongly disagree with the contents of the article entitled ‘The Silence of the Lambs,’ because I think the article has defamed my honor and dignity as an Adyghe, as well as insulting all Muslims. The article compares us to pigs and cowards, and claims we have no sense of self-esteem.”
Basically, it was for the sake of this passage that the investigator obtained Guchetl’s testimony. In fact, the investigator could have written something even rougher on Guchetl’s behalf, because he already his signatures on blank interrogation report forms.
Finally, I made a motion to rule the Teuchezhsky District Council an illegitimate injured party in my case, since it did not satisfy the grounds set out in Article 42 of the Russian Federal Criminal Procedure Code. When the prosecutors objected as usual, spouting platitudes about the proper recognition of the local authorities as an injured party, we demanded the prosecution present legal grounds for its stance. We were quite curious to find out how exactly the district council had been injured, if, as they themselves have said, the article had caused moral injury to the residents of the Teuchezhsky District.
The prosecutors drew a blank and requested a time-out until the next hearing, at which they promised to provide a written justification for their objection. That suited us just fine, as it did the judge, who postponed consideration of our motion until next time.
The next court hearing is scheduled for June 24.
Translated by the Russian Reader. Photos courtesy of Valery Brinikh. Please read my previous posts on his case.
The Russian Reader 