Detention and arrest for a small non-criminal incident, poor translation, a messy investigation and the same kind of trial, lack of evidence of guilt in the case, a sentence of seven and a half years imprisonment, appeal, fight. Freedom. A total of just under 300 days in a Russian jail.
Most of us know that the percentage of acquittals in Russia is at the scale of a statistical error. Under such conditions, some prefer a compromise with the investigation to a fight. Naama Issachar chose the latter. And she won.
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The court who sentenced Issachar and the court of appeal both demonstrated to Naama the crafty magic tricks they use to pin a label on a person and deprive them of all hope. They also showed her that a person may go to jail and stay there for good, even when there is no evidence of guilt.
But the worst part of Naama's case is not the lack of evidence, but rather the court's complete indifference to the fact that the person on trial does not understand the language of judicial proceedings and therefore has no idea what is happening to her, not to mention the fact that the "interpreter" engaged by the court could not understand Naama. But as it turns out, in a modern Russian court even this fact is neglected when a judgment of conviction is passed.
When we received the ruling on the appeal, in which the court upheld Naama's seven-and-a-half-year sentence imprisonment, something else became clear: The more the contentions the defense submits to the court regarding the unlawfulness of the sentence (our petition for appeal included 56 pages of these), the shorter and more meaningless will the court's response to these contentions be.
We are used to the fact that the court ignores even the most straightforward contentions by the defense, but we are always curious to read the rationale behind the sentence, to see how the court managed to dodge them to rule that black is, in fact, white.
Too much of Naama's case was crystal clear, which is why the court of appeal decided not to deal with it at all, they just brushed the case off. As a result, we have a blatantly unceremonious, unscrupulous, and completely unjustified reply stretching three paragraphs of platitudes, which boiled down to the following: no material violation of the law has been committed.
One thing is lamentable about this case: Naama got her freedom not by virtue of the law, but through the institute of the presidential pardon, which does not require using the law. But even the pardon could hardly have been granted by itself, without a fight.
