Приговор при свечах / Judgment in candlelight - Владимир Анатольевич Арсентьев

function that is inconsistent with judicial duties. So what phenomena does this new rule of criminal process represent? Is special procedure not a reflection of political aspects like secrecy and opacity?

“The dry wood cracked spritely in the fire; we sat around recounting our experiences from the night before.

“I could tell that Dersu wanted to ask me something but appeared apprehensive. I asked him what was on his mind.

“‘My heard there also Russian Khunkhuz. Is true?’ he asked shyly.

“‘True,’ I relied. ‘However the Russian Khunkhuz act alone or in pairs; they never band up in large gangs like the Chinese do. The Russian government would not let it get that far.’

“I thought that my explanation had satisfied the Gold, but then I noticed that his thoughts were directed elsewhere.

“‘How can that be?’ He mused aloud. ‘There is a tsar, many different captains, and the Khunkhuz. Chinese have tsar too, and also Khunkhuz. How do mine live? No tsar, no captains, no Khunkhuz.’

“At first I thought the juxtaposition of tsar and Khunkhuz was strange, but as I dissected the meaning of his words I understood what he trying to say. If people are categorized by social strata, then there must be rich and poor, the do-nothings and the worker. Once they are sorted into honest and the dishonest, then the criminal element is separated out like its own caste, which the Chinese call Khunkhuz.”[176]

Once the judge, in the rank of a captain, came by the office of an experienced investigator in the rank of a mayor, who became subtly embarrassed. The judge was not lost on it and noticed what the investigator was doing. He was rewriting the interrogation report – not merely copying it, but filling it with accusatory meaning and falsifying the evidence.

In that specific event, the court considering the case did not accept the forged interrogation report as evidence and delivered a lawful, reasonable, and justified verdict. In other events, district prosecutors personally exposed similar offenses committed by fraudulent investigators and sentenced them to probation with disenfranchisement.[177] One of those benchmark sentences was proposed by the Supreme Court as a positive example of delivering justice in crimes against justice.[178] Moreover, the author of those verdicts was recommended to join the Supreme Court for reasons of national advisability.

The bodies of investigation can be disestablished at no cost for the civil society. Without this artificial political institution, any inquiry officer (court investigator, a friend of the prosecutor, etc.) can do all of the following: arrest the suspect; find the victim, if there is one; make a list of the witnesses and pass it to the prosecutor. The latter, if they so decide, can personally present witnesses for the first and (preferably) last court hearing, formulate the accusatory speech and suggest a decision. Any judicial investigation culminates in a conviction or acquittal. The proceedings take ten days, twenty in exceptional circumstances, and one month in special cases. The judicial decision can be reviewed on appeal and reversed only in cassation in case of a serious breach of the court procedure. Jurors can take part in the hearing only if the accused person expresses such a desire before the court proceedings start.

Thus, love of freedom, being no political sentiment, is inclined to question or critically reflect on the authority that brought forth personal property and the new reality. The new crisis relations have manifested in the special procedure with its catastrophic inequality and “might as right,” ultimately leading to social demoralization. The reactionary character of this change is strengthened by a mythological procedure – a mechanism to crush the will of a person or possibly a petri dish for new crimes. “Myth is not free fiction: a true myth is a tenet of collective self-determination, and therefore neither fiction nor allegory nor personification, but an image of a being or energy,”[179] wrote Vyacheslav Ivanov (1866–1949), a 20th century humanitarian philosopher of culture who survived his own critical epoch.

Will we survive our own?

Chapter III: the intellect method

3.1. The Investigator Judge

Multiple additional investigations and intermediary judicial proceedings in the criminal case against Kochetov were spawned by the officials’ desire to use others to their own advantage and by their own fear of being used. After four years of red tape, the murder case was passed to the judge.

Here is the story told in the case file. Several courts of different compositions proposed that investigation authorities should exhume what was supposedly the remains of Dneprova – so as to check the version of the defense. The prosecution insisted that it had already been checked – they found the remains and identified Dneprova’s palm, a piece of her dress, and her cross pendant on a string. During the course of this debate, Kochetov was going in and out of jail. In fact, the court decisions hadn’t been addressed, because instead of working on the case, officials were just creating more and more paperwork.

While examining the case file, the judge also found out that the investigation accused Kochetov of dismembering and hiding an unidentified corpse in a sewer manhole and killing Dneprova under unclear circumstances shortly thereafter. The judge requested further investigation – yet again.[180]

The cassation instance agreed with the protest filed by the prosecutor and based its decision on that document. It also followed from Kochetov’s indictment that there was a significant breach of criminal procedure. The higher instance court described it as a typo and asked the first instance court to correct the error made by the investigation. The motivation was that “the elements of Kochetov’s offense do not include the time period during which he was concealing his crime.”[181]

Meanwhile, the judge’s ruling referred to specific case materials and investigation records, from where it followed that the resolution to bring charges against Kochetov