Scientist’s Lawyers Appeal Sentence in Espionage Trial
Created: 14.04.2004 13:22 MSK (GMT +3), Updated: 17:55 MSK, 5 hours 53 minutes ago
MosNews
The lawyers of the scientist Igor Sutyagin, sentenced to 15 years of prison for espionage, filed an appeal to the Supreme Court on Wednesday.
The defense declared that “considerable violations of the Criminal Procedure Code have been made” during the process, the lawyer Anna Stavitskaya was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying. In particular, the staff change in the court of jury was ungrounded, and some arguments considered by the court were inadmissible, she said.
Stavitskaya, quoted by the agency, added that some of the questions set before the jurors went beyond the charge: in particular, they had to say whether Sutyagin was acting on the instructions of foreign intelligence, although he had not been charged with doing so.
The defense has filed a short appeal, Stavitskaya was quoted by the agency as saying. A longer one will by filed only after the lawyers become familiar with the protocols of the court session.
The Moscow City Court sentenced Sutyagin on April 7. Two days before, the jury found him guilty of espionage and said he deserved no leniency.
Sutyagin, an arms control specialist with the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies, was accused of having five meetings with foreign intelligence agents to whom he passed on information on air-to-air missiles, the MIG-29SMT fighter jet, plans for Russia’s strategic nuclear forces up to 2007, the Defense Ministry’s work in 1998 to implement plans to develop permanent readiness units and about the structure and condition of the Russian early warning system.
The jury found him guilty on all charges. Sutyagin did not plead guilty, claiming his research on civilian-military relations in Russia was based on non-classified sources, such as newspaper articles and publicly available government documents. As a civilian researcher with no security clearance, he did not have access to any classified materials.
The Federal Security Service (FSB), however, says that the accuracy of the research indicates that Sutyagin must have used classified documents to draw his conclusions.
