Vadim Klyuvgant: Plea-Bargaining Your Life Away
In an opinion editorial for The Moscow Times, Vadim Klyuvgant, the lead attorney for Mikhail Khodorkovsky, discusses the new Russian law on plea bargaining that "ostensibly opens new opportunities to ease the fate of defendants".
He notes the story of former YUKOS executive and Spanish citizen Antonio Valdez-Garcia "who miraculously survived under the "protection" of officers from the prosecutor general and the Interior Ministry. While held in some secret place, Valdez-Garcia said he was beaten and tortured to extract incriminating evidence against his alleged accomplices."
He adds that the "corrupt siloviki...will use every means at their disposal. Also, improving the statistics - that is, the percentage of solved cases - is far more important for the siloviki than protecting the rights of defendants."
Finally, he discusses Vasily Aleksanyan, who investigators "used inhumane methods to extract from him ‘proof incriminating other accomplices and helping to reveal additional crimes.'"
Klyuvgant concludes that these two cases are "perhaps the most infamous examples of prosecutors abusing a defendant's rights, but there are many similar cases across Russia."