Jury trials raise alarms from rights groups
By Anna Dolgov, Globe Correspondent
OBNINSK, Russia -- The walls of the apartment are covered with
children's paintings -- still-life studies in blue and yellow that the
two girls made after security service agents seized other pictures as
evidence in an espionage case against their father.
Igor Sutyagin, an arms control researcher from a respected think tank,
lived in the apartment until he was jailed in 1999. Despite insistence
by rights groups that the charges were trumped up and that the
prosecution had failed to present any serious evidence, a jury court
convicted Sutyagin of espionage and treason April 6.
He was sentenced to 15 years in jail earlier this month, with the 4
years he spent in pretrial detention counted toward the term.
''The girls will be 23 and 24 when he serves out his sentence," said the
researcher's father, Vyacheslav, sitting on a couch under his
granddaughters' paintings in Sutyagin's home in this town southwest of
Moscow.
Russia introduced jury trials in the 1990s after decades of having guilt
or innocence decided by a presiding judge and two deputies, who
routinely rubber-stamped guilty verdicts. Sutyagin's case and others
have been marred by allegations of jury manipulation and pressure to
achieve verdicts sought by President Vladimir V. Putin's Kremlin,
reviving a semblance of Soviet
show trials.
''These kinds of machinations with juries to achieve the needed result .
. . are another demonstration of Putin's absolute disregard for
democracy," said Alexei Melnikov, a former legislator whose liberal
faction pushed for setting up jury trials before it lost Parliament
seats in a sweeping victory by a pro-Kremlin party last December.
In cases with no political issues at stake, the acquittal rate in jury
trials has been much higher, and in the first politically sensitive
hearing, physicist Valentin Danilov was acquitted of spying last
December. The charges were initiated by the Federal Security Service, or
FSB, the domestic successor to the Soviet KGB, and rights advocates say
that after the December ruling, the agency made sure it would not lose
again.
''The FSB couldn't tolerate that. They used all their resources to
ensure guilty verdicts," said Ernst Chyorny, a leader of the group
Ecology and Human Rights who closely followed the cases.
On the same day Sutyagin was convicted, a panel of jurors delivered a
guilty verdict in another case that raised alarms from rights groups.
Zarema Muzhikhoyeva, from Ingushetia, a region adjoining war-ravaged
Chechnya, was found guilty of terrorism. But Muzhikhoyeva, 23, says she
had been forced into a suicide-bombing attempt last July by separatist
rebels. She did not set off the homemade bomb when arrested on a street
that runs outward from the Kremlin, and she cooperated with
investigators.
Her testimony led investigators to a safe-house for bombers and a cache
of explosives and helped create a composite of a suspected organizer of
several deadly attacks. But an explosives specialist from the FSB was
killed while trying to defuse her bomb.
Critics noted the extenuating circumstances in her case in arguing for
leniency in sentencing. But the jury recommended no leniency, and she
received a 20-year prison term.
Muzhikhoyeva screamed when the verdict in the closed-door trial was read
aloud, according to her lawyer, Natalya Yevlapova.
''Don't you understand that I never blew up anything?" Muzhikhoyeva
cried out at the jurors, according to the lawyer.
Sutyagin was accused of spying for the United States by providing
classified data to a British firm that investigators say was a cover for
the CIA. The researcher or his Russian employer, the Institute for USA
and Canada Studies, had no access to classified information, and
Sutyagin says he openly freelanced for the British firm, Alternative
Futures, analyzing public materials.
After initial hearings last year, his trial was postponed, the judge was
replaced, and -- without explanation and against the law, defense
attorneys allege -- new jurors were selected.
''I have major suspicions about the makeup of this jury," Chyorny said.
''All 12 jurors wouldn't have voted the same way in the absence of
strong proof, unless they were specially handpicked to do that."
Defense attorneys said the prosecution failed to present evidence at the
closed-door trial to support its contention that Sutyagin used anything
beyond public materials in his work. The researcher's lawyer, Vladimir
Vasiltsov also said that the sides had a pool of only 35 potential
jurors to choose from and that the preliminary stage that produced those
35 candidates remained an ''absolute mystery" for the defense team,
stoking worries that people linked to the FSB had been planted inside
the group.
The new judge, Marina Komarova, has a history of handing down guilty
verdicts in FSB cases, and Sutyagin's attorneys said she barred the
testimony of crucial defense witnesses and dictated a guilty verdict by
her final questions to the jurors.
''This was classic manipulation," Vasiltsov said. ''Judge Komarova did
everything she could to ensure a guilty verdict.
''She asked jurors to consider if meetings in Birmingham and London took
place, if conversations took place, if there was a transfer of data --
and Igor never denied most of this -- but there was no mention of
whether the data came from open sources or of whether it constituted
state secrets.
''The way the questions were phrased, if I were placed within strict
boundaries and had to answer just 'yes' or 'no,' I tend to think I would
have been forced to answer like the jurors did," he said.
In Sutyagin's home, shelves are still stacked with newspapers and
magazines he used in his work, with passages underlined in red. Obninsk
was a ''closed city" under the Soviet Union that opened up in the late
1980s, and Sutyagin thought he was free to work for foreigners.
But he wasn't. FSB agents scooped up everything when they searched the
apartment -- his notes, computer, his daughters' paintings. They later
returned most things, except the computer.
Even after Sutyagin's sentencing, the telephone in his home is tapped,
and letters arrive opened or clumsily glued back shut, relatives say.
''Maybe the jurors were specially selected, or maybe they were just
never given a chance to understand this case," said Sutyagin's father,
Vyacheslav.
Sutyagin's wife, Irina Manannikova, said: ''The FSB can be proud now --
finally the jurors have closed this chapter. A jury trial is a major
trump card the FSB can flash."
