Torn away from the Law: How Law Enforcement Avoids Compliance

Metastases of "Basmanny justice" spread throughout the vast country. Today, the monstrous incompetence and absolute isolation of “law enforcement officers” from the law is no longer striking, but the way with which they calmly and confidently spit on the law, I am sure the well-known Moscow lawyer Alkhas Abgadzhava, who, as an example, told about one of the cases he was leading:

“The action takes place in Ostashkov, Tver region. One official, the head of the education department with a zootechnician diploma, decided to get rid of the objectionable school director. Omitting the details of how he did it, the time will come for this, but as a result, a criminal case was born on charges of bribery by the headmaster.

From whom do you think? I am sure that you have not guessed right. From own accountants - chief accountant and ordinary.

Moreover, the case is based on the testimony of the chief accountant, who claims that she gave bribes to the director on a monthly basis from the incentive payments received for... attention... so that the director would not fire her from her job.

The second accountant transferred her part of the payments to the chief accountant, thinking that she was also transferring this money to the director of the school.

The investigator of the Investigative Committee of Zhukova, with inherent simplicity and straightforwardness, described all this in the accusation to the director.

My question, why the actions of the chief accountant in terms of collecting money are not qualified as complicity, surprised the talented investigator, but did not embarrass her.

The most interesting thing happened when reading the materials of the criminal case. We found in the financial documents monthly payments to the chief accountant and the second accountant for a decent amount, not provided for by the orders of the director and labor agreements.

And here's the motive for the slander! Naturally, they declared the need for expertise and procedural assessment of the actions of accountants.

Well, of course, the tracker refused. They announced a challenge and went to a personal meeting with the prosecutor. Surprisingly, the prosecutor did not ignore our arguments and returned the case to the investigation without confirming the indictment, pointing out the need for a legal assessment of the facts of unjustified payments to accountants.

It would seem that a happy ending is on the horizon. Ha ha! For half a year, the case just lay in the UK, and here in August a new investigator, Bystrov, appoints an accounting expertise and even includes our questions there. All right, we think good champagne can be chilled.

The head of the Investigative Committee takes and cancels the decision of the investigator on the appointment of an examination with the right questions and appoints it with the necessary investigation.

I understand that all this is tedious to read, I am still very abbreviated, but I was talking about incompetence at the very beginning. So, the prosecutor, in response to my complaint about the latest tricks of the Investigative Committee, decided to tell me about the proof and evidence.

Referring to Article 73 of the Criminal Procedure Code of the Russian Federation, he explained to me that the circumstances to be proved include: the event of the crime (time, place, method and other circumstances of the crime), the person's guilt in the crime, the form of his guilt and motives. And that's it!

I had to reveal to the prosecutor that Article 73 of the Code of Criminal Procedure of the Russian Federation really contains such provisions, but not only, it still has clauses that say:

that the circumstances to be proved are “circumstances precluding criminality and punishability of the act”.

And in paragraph 7 of the same article "circumstances that may entail release from criminal responsibility and punishment"

We continue to fight. But I will repeat one thought that I have already expressed.

Today, we, lawyers, doing our job, are forced to force officials who officially and ex officio defend the law to comply with the law.

And they resist and simply evade the observance of this very law. If before they did it somehow sophisticated and creative, now they don't bother at all.

At the same time, enemies and crooks, of course, we..."