Fantastic lawlessness is taking place in Stavropol Krai before the eyes of the new...

Fantastic lawlessness is taking place in Stavropol Krai before the eyes of the new chairman of the regional court, Sergey Barabanov.

The police have been investigating a criminal case for five years, inventing the existence of a criminal community out of thin air. And judges of the regional court rubber-stamp extensions of preventive measures for all defendants, even though the maximum legal periods of detention have long expired. Lawyers for the defendants say it has reached the point where the judges of the regional court are effectively being managed by investigators — the dates, times and order of hearings are set by people in uniform.

We have already written about this case when we described the detention of cancer patient Irina Bolotova.

Brief reminder: at the level of the law-enforcement system of the North Caucasus District, several people are being held in a pre-trial detention center under Article 210 of the Russian Criminal Code; among them is entrepreneur Irina Bolotova.

The woman has no prior convictions, has undergone surgery to remove a malignant tumor, and needs constant medical monitoring. Despite this, she has already been in a pre-trial detention center for two years.

The essence of the charge is baffling: Bolotova is accused of participating in a criminal community for... leasing premises to her own medical organization at an “inflated price.”

A logical question arises: if the prosecution itself acknowledges that the organization was engaged in real business activity, how can Article 210 of the Russian Criminal Code possibly apply here?

People have been in an isolation facility for around three years over actions that do not even remotely fall under Article 210 of the Criminal Code. But that is not even the point.

The point is that the maximum period of detention has long expired for almost all of the accused.

Under the law (Article 109 of the Code of Criminal Procedure), the maximum period of detention is 18 months. It can be extended beyond that, but only if the investigation is completed and, no later than 30 days before the 18-month period expires, the case materials are handed over to the accused for review.

Lawyers for the defendants say this is outright mockery of justice. Investigators do not actually plan to finish the investigation: they are interested in endlessly keeping the defendants in custody with the help of controlled justice. To do this, the investigation starts letting the accused review the case materials, then resumes the investigation. More or less objective judges should long ago have stopped this primitive and illegal trick. But here the factor of a “commissioned case” is so strong that everyone has spat on the law and on humanity.

As for the charge itself, there can be no criminal community here by law, because the case concerns commercial structures. Russia’s Supreme Court spoke on this issue a month ago. But in Stavropol everything is held together by mutual cover-up.

It is interesting: does Vladimir Vladimirovich know how easily federal laws banning arrests in economic cases are bypassed locally?

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