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 Fear Rules In Russia's Courtrooms
 
 By Peter Finn
 
  MOSCOW -- The case before Judge Alexander Melikov involved a juvenile from Tajikistan who had gotten into a shoving match with a co-worker outside a train station in July 2003. The juvenile had allegedly thrown a beer bottle at the other man, but missed, according to court documents. The juvenile was charged with hooliganism.
 
 In court, the victim said he forgave the young Tajik, who had no previous criminal record, and asked Melikov to be lenient. The judge gave the juvenile a four-year suspended sentence with three years of probation. 
 
 Prosecutors did not appeal.
 
 But the sentence helped get Melikov stripped of his judgeship in December, when he was brought before a judicial disciplinary body called the Qualification Collegium. The judge was charged with 22 counts of "neglecting the interests of justice, belittling the reputation of judicial power, and undermining the people's trust in the judicial system." In the case of the Tajik, Melikov's superior, Olga Yegorova, accused him of giving only suspended sentences to foreigners who had committed "grave crimes."
 
 Concerns about the independence of Russia's justice system have recently focused on high-profile cases such as the prosecution of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, an oil baron, and a series of treason trials involving Russian scholars. President Bush raised the issue of the rule of law as it relates to the quality of Russian democracy during his summit with President Vladimir Putin this past week.
 
 The Melikov case illustrates how a climate of fear generally pervades the bench in Russian criminal courts. Judges are targeted for forced retirement or dismissal if they apply the law to acquit even everyday defendants, issue sentences that are seen as too lenient by court chairmen or fail to follow prosecution requests to send suspects to overcrowded pretrial prisons where they can languish for months, according to judges, law professors and lawyers. The climate reflects the growing power of the state in Putin's Russia.
 
 "Between 2001 and May 2004, I considered 460 criminal cases involving 544 individuals, and only four of my verdicts were overturned by higher courts," said Melikov, 42, who was also criticized for suspending sentences and dropping charges when the parties reconciled.
 
 A detailed review of Melikov's work by three experts commissioned by the Russia-based Independent Council of Legal Experts found that his rulings, with one minor exception from a case in 1998, followed Russian law.
 
 "The decisions of Alexander Melikov . . . are in line with the criminal and criminal-procedure law," wrote Polina Lupinskaya, head of the Criminal Procedure Department at Moscow State Law Academy. The charges against him were "groundless," she wrote, noting that treating foreigners such as the Tajik differently violates the Russian constitution. 
 
 In 2002, Russia adopted a code of criminal procedure that was supposed to herald a legal revolution by firmly establishing the independence of the judiciary, increasing the rights of the accused, and forcing firm rules of procedure and evidence on police and prosecutors. But the current system continues to perpetuate the Soviet practice of almost automatically convicting everyone who appears in court. 
 
 The same year, a separate criminal justice reform was supposed to enshrine the presumption of innocence and usher in democratic legal norms that were widely praised at the time. Among its provisions, defendants are entitled to ask for a lawyer when detained and are supposed to be brought before a judge within 48 hours. Judges, not prosecutors,  are to issue an arrest warrant and order the accused to be held in a pretrial prison or to be freed pending trial. Defense lawyers  are to have greater powers to challenge evidence in court.
 
 According to legal scholars, efforts to bring about change have stalled. The goal of breaking old habits and creating a system in which judges act as independent arbiters between the state and the individual, has not been met yet.
 
 "We are still living with an ideology of the past, and we haven't created a new legal culture," said Sergei Vitsin, a professor of law and deputy chair of the Presidential Council on the Reform of the Justice System. "Judges do not see themselves as in any way separate from prosecutors and police. You can write democratic laws, but you have to follow them, too."
 
 The chairman of the Russian Supreme Court, Vyacheslav Lebedev, contested the view that judicial reforms were failing and that judges were cowed by their superiors.
 
 "Some people say, 'Look what the court chairmen are doing, they terrorize disagreeable judges,' " Lebedev said in an interview on Russia's NTV channel this month. " . . . This is all wrong."
 
 Public confidence in the justice system remains low. Dmitri Kozak, a presidential adviser who spearheaded judicial reform efforts for Putin, acknowledged in a recent speech to judges that Russians believe that "truth is impossible to find" in the system.
 
 In Russia, the conviction rate in criminal cases heard by judges is around 99 percent, according to the administrative arm of the country's Supreme Court. The rate has persisted since the early 1950s, the last years of the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, when the work of judges and prosecutors was automatically reviewed if a defendant was acquitted. Before 1951, about 10 percent of defendants were acquitted in non-political trials, according to Sergei Pashin, a former judge and a professor at the Moscow Institute of Economy, Politics and Law. 
 
 In some courts, there simply are no acquittals. In 2003 and in the first nine months of 2004, two district courts in Moscow that heard a total of 4,428 criminal cases had no acquittals, according to court records. Officials at the courts declined to comment on the statistics. In the regional court in the southern Russian city Krasnodar, no one has been acquitted in the last 10 years in cases heard by judges, court officials said.
 
 "Judges think of themselves as soldiers in the front line fighting crime," said Sergei Tsirkun, who was a prosecutor in Moscow for 10 years and in that time never lost a case. "A judge is not going to pass an acquittal unless he is absolutely, 100 percent confident that someone is innocent. If he has the slightest suspicion that someone might be guilty, he will find them guilty even if he has to ignore problems with the evidence."
 
 In jury trials, which were introduced in 1993 in nine regions and expanded nationwide in 2003, a defendant is more likely to be found not guilty, with acquittal rates of around 15 percent, according to Supreme Court statistics. In Krasnodar, for instance, where judges find everyone brought before them guilty, juries find 20 percent of defendants not guilty.
 
 "At least a jury trial cannot be compared to the nightmare of an ordinary trial before a judge," said Sergei Nasonov, a professor of criminal law at the Moscow State Law Academy who has written a book on jury trials in Russia. "In a jury trial there is hope for justice and there is no hope in an ordinary trial."
 
 But jury trials represent about 8 percent of all criminal trials, and acquittals are often appealed, overturned by the Supreme Court and sent back for retrial with a fresh jury, according to law professors and defense lawyers. In some cases, prosecutors obtain a guilty verdict after two or three jury acquittals.
 
  Moreover, there is increasing suspicion that the selection of jurors, particularly in sensitive cases, is not always random, as required by law, according to Nasonov and other legal experts.
 
 Judge Melikov, a veteran of the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, worked as a criminal investigator for the Interior Ministry before becoming a judge in 1997. He received lifetime tenure in 2000. Melikov said he first knew he was in trouble with his superiors in late 2002, a few months after the introduction of the new criminal code, when he refused to issue an arrest warrant for a robbery suspect because the police had failed to follow new procedures.
 
 At a meeting of judges, Melikov said, their superior, Yegorova, publicly criticized him. Yegorova, who is head of the Moscow City Court, said at the gathering that judges should automatically issue arrest warrants, Melikov said.
 
 Yegorova, who did not respond to a faxed request for an interview, was appointed in 1999 by the Kremlin over the objections of some senior city and federal judges, including Lebedev, the chairman of the Supreme Court, according to Russian media reports quoting a letter from him.
 
 Yegorova, the wife of a general in the FSB, the domestic successor to the KGB, has been accused of pressuring subordinates in certain cases and not tolerating acquittals or lenient verdicts. In her first year in office, 17 judges resigned from the Moscow City Court, most from the criminal courts, according to the Independent Council of Legal Experts.
 
 "We all left because of this atmosphere, which Yegorova created," said Viktor Kononenko, who retired as a judge from the Moscow City Court in 2001. "She wouldn't accept our methods of work. People with whom I worked, some very experienced, were told to move cases along quickly without observing the legal norms. We weren't judged on the quality of justice in our courtrooms."
 
 Melikov decided to fight when the judicial authorities sought to remove him and 12 other judges in 2004; most of the targeted judges retired. Melikov said he was offered a resignation package that would have entitled him to retain his pension.
 
 In the hearing before the judicial disciplinary body, Melikov argued his case for about three hours, saying that in some cases, his allegedly poor decisions were not contested by prosecutors or were upheld by the Supreme Court, information Yegorova omitted in her motion.
 
 But the disciplinary body took less than five minutes to find for Yegorova and remove Melikov from the bench.
 
  This past week, Melikov began his appeal, which could take several weeks to complete. It is being heard in the Moscow City Court, which is headed by Yegorova.
 
   

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