Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Russian Courts Seek to Reduce Ability of Juries to Find Anyone Innocent

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Jan. 25 – Russian judges find fewer than one percent of the defendants before them innocent, while juries now find roughly a quarter of those whose cases they hear not guilty. That pattern has alarmed the Russian authorities who have adopted a variety of strategies to reduce the chances that juries will return so many not guilty verdicts.
    The most common and the one that has been used the longest is to restrict the number of criminal cases held before juries with officials arguing that they can’t find enough Russians to serve on juries or to appeal jury decisions to higher courts where they are often overridden, Yekaterian Trifonova says (ng.ru/politics/2025-01-26/1_9178_jury.html).
    But such methods have proved insufficient to reduce the number of not guilty findings by juries, the Nezavismaya Gazeta politics reporter says; and so the authorities have now adopted other tactics, including having judges deny defense lawyers the opportunity to present alternative versions of the case before the jury.
    Such methods seldom get the coverage that the more blatant forms of intervention do, but they are an increasingly part of the toolbox the authorities draw on to prevent juries from finding people innocent and thus calling into question just how many more Russians are being railroaded into guilty findings.
    Trifonova’s article is important because she calls attention to something that few reporters Russian or international often include in their reporting about Russian jurisprudence and a reminder that Putin’s efforts to use the simulacra of law are being undertaken here as elsewhere to subvert law and justice.

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