O julgamento do caso Politkovskaya - III

Continuamos hoje com a serializacao do artigo de Keith Gessen sobre o julgamento do assassínio de Anna Politkovskaya, publicado na edicao de 23 Marco da revista New Yorker:

(O fillho da victima acreditava 'honestamente' que os réus escondiam algo. Getty Images)

One person in the room was unconvinced by Dzhabrail's testimony: Ilya Polikovsky, the victim's son. Thirty years old, a little chubby and in an expensive shirt, Ilya looked less like the son of a dissident journalist than like one of the successful young men who fill Moscow's mid-priced restaurants and upscale coffee shops. In fact, this was about right: Ilya had been sent to England for high school and college, and now works in public relations. In the courtroom, he was a ball of energy, watching Dzhabrail's testimony with intensity, whispering to his lawyer when he though he'd spotted a contradiction. 'He's digging a hole for himself!' he said at one point, though it wasn't at all obvious that Dzhabrail was.

'I'm sure they know something,' he said of the brothers a few days later, when we met in a sushi restaurant near the agency where he works. 'Clearly, they're afraid of something. Maybe it's their family. Maybe it's someone else.' He didn't believe that they couldn't remember October 7th. 'When something really important happens, you remember. I remember what I was doing all day when the Twin Towers fell. I remember what I was doing during Nord-Ost' - he was referring to the Moscow theatre that was taken over by Chechen terrorist in 2002. 'I remember what I was doing in the days of Beslan' - the southern town where Chechen terrorist seized a school in 2004. 'Honest, I can. Events like that remain in a person's memory.' I suggested that the murder of Anna Politkovskaya would not necessarily have registered that way with the Makhmudov brothers. 'If you got into a car that evening, and turned on the radio, what did you hear?' Ilya responded. 'Just one piece of news. The brother whop says he wrote a dissertation and all that - he says he doesn't remember? I don't believe it. I do not believe it.'

It's an emotionally power feature of Russian criminal law that 'the side of the victims' - storona poterpevshykh - is represented on an equal footing with the prosecution and the defence. The counsel for the victims is allowed to call and question witnesses, submit protests to the court, make closing remarks. It's an ambiguous institution: where the prosecution wants a conviction, and the defence wants an acquittal, the victims want justice - or, as the victims and their lawyers kept saying, 'the truth.' Ilya would never have been an idle observer of the trial, but in this case he was also, as they say, lawyered up.

(A advogada de acusacao nao sabia o que fazer com os suspeitos. Alexey Sazonov/AFP/Getty Images)

In keeping with the importance of the case, the Polikovsky legal team was led by Karinna Moskalenko, the best known human-rights lawyer in Russia. Now in her mid-fifties, she has been a defence attorney in numerous politically motivated cases, including the 2005 trial of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky (who, after he started funding opposition parties, was convicted of fraud and tax evasion) and some harassing cases against the opposition leader Garry Kasparov; she was the first Russian lawyer to present oral arguments before the European Court of Human Rights, in Strasbourg. She was a good friend of Politkovskaya. In the courtroom, Moskalenko exuded moral authority; she did not take part in the minor and increasingly personal squabbling that flared up between the prosecution and the defence; and, when she spoke, people listened. 'Your honour,' she would preface many of her remarks, 'her voice carrying across the room, 'the side of the victims believes that...'

But Moskalenko did not know what to make of Dzhabrail. She asked him about his studies; she asked him about his family. She tried to help him remember what he was doing in the neighbourhood of Politkovskaya's building that day - maybe he was running an errand to the nearby Butyrki prison, as he'd said he'd done many times? No, Dzhabrail said, he was pretty sure he wasn't. Perhaps someone had merely asked him to stand somewhere, sit somewhere, in a car for example, not telling him what it was about? 'You know, I've thought about that a lot since I got picked up,' Dzhabrail said. 'Could someone have set me up? Could one of my family members have set me up? And I thought about it and thought about it and decided that no, that couldn't be. One hundred per cent no.'

The trial was remarkably open. Judge Zubov, who had been widely condemned after he attempted to close the proceedings to the press, was hardly an authoritarian figure: one of the journalists dubbed him 'Winnie the Pooh.' He did not seem to want, and he certainly did not exercise, control over the courtroom. Everyone, including the defendants, spoke pretty much when they pleased; the parents of the Makhmudov brothers, who sat there every day, never taking off their overcoats, occasionally called out in Chechen. Especially liberal were the breaks: Judge Zubov was most authoritarian when announcing them, early and often. Then the radio reporters would get sound recordings, sometimes from the defendants in their cage: you could just walk up to them and ask them questions. In the corridor, journalists, the lawyers, the jurors, and the families of the victim and the accused all mixed together. (The prosecutors had their own office, and retired there.) During one break, I spoke with Dzhabrail's brother Tamerland, who had been held in custody for ten months.

'What was it like?'
'Bad.'
'They hit you?'
'Yup.'
'In the face?'
'No,' he said, smiling shyly. 'They can't hit you in the face, it leaves a mark. They hit you here, in the kidneys. Also, they put a bag over your head and crumple up little dry crackers in it, and eventually you have to breathe them into your lungs and it scratches up your insides. You start spitting blood. So that's a little thing that they do.'
We were called back inside.

(O julgamento decorria de forma descontraída, pelo menos para a defesa. Getty Images)