©Human Rights Watch Boris Botvinnik, Torture Victim

Boris Botvinnik—Moscow

Boris Botvinnik, a mathematics Ph.D student in Moscow, lost most of his eyesight after police beat and asphyxiated him at his Moscow apartment in September 1996.

Botvinnik told Human Rights Watch of his torture:

The riot police officer started to pick a plastic bag from my bag. He said that he wasn't going to waste his own, and methodically took bags out of my bag and blew into them. I think the third one he picked was a red LEGO bag. I had bought Sashka [Botvinnik's daughter] a present for her first half-a-year, the bag turned out to be intact. They put the bag over my head. From time to time the detective came in. As I understood, he clarified some details because the riot police did not know what was needed.... The bag on my head, they beat on my forehead and ears. Sometimes, when I held my breath for a long time, they punched my solar plexus

In Botvinnik's case, along with that of two co-defendants, Dmitrii Koligov, and Mikhail Shikalenko, investigators heavily relied on the men's "confessions" as well as on a videotaped "investigative reenactment" at the site of the crime. Botvinnik told Human Rights Watch that after he signed a "confession," police took him to the place of the crime to reenact it. Botvinnik (pictured right) was supposed to show police where he had done what at the time of the crime. Botvinnik claims that police prompted him during the entire reenactment and at one point even led him down the wrong staircase, where they got stuck and had to turn back. Both Koligov and Shikalenko described in court how police had beaten them into confessing.

Judge Valentina Komarova of the Nikulin District Court issued a guilty verdict in March 1999, two years after first receiving the case.

©Human Rights Watch Sergei Mikhailov, Torture Victim, in his prison cell.

Sergei Mikhailov—Arkhangel'sk

The case of death-row prisoner Sergei Mikhailov (pictured left), whose innocence appears to have been irrefutably proven but who still languishes in jail, reveals the overwhelming importance given to confessions in Russia. It appears that once a confession-based conviction is obtained, the resistance to reopening or reviewing the case becomes extraordinarily high, even in the face of dramatic new evidence.

Following the murder and rape of a ten-year-old girl in the provincial town of Vel'sk in Arkhangel'sk province in October 1994, police detained twenty-one-year-old Sergei Mikhailov for ten days in December 1994 for petty hooliganism. Denied access to a lawyer, Mikhailov claimed that police beat him over the course of these ten days and threatened to throw him into a so-called "pressing room," (see methods) where cell mates who are police trustees would beat and rape him. While still in incommunicado detention, Mikhailov confessed to the murder. After Mikhailov was granted access to a lawyer, he withdrew his confession. In April 1995, the Arkhangel'sk Province Court tried the case and sentenced Mikhailov to death, based largely on his confession. The Supreme Court confirmed the sentence on appeal.

In November 1996, a murder almost identical to the one for which Mikhailov had been convicted occurred in Vel'sk. In the course of the investigation, police arrested Alexander Kozlov, who reportedly confessed not only to the second but also to the first murder.

Instead of immediately starting proceedings to correct a miscarriage of justice against Mikhailov, the Arkhangel'sk procuracy tried to obscure its mistake. Although the procuracy's special investigator concluded in July 1997 that Mikhailov had been wrongly convicted and recommended that the sentence be overturned, the head of the procuracy in Arkhangel'sk, Alexander Apanasenko, refused to send this conclusion to the Procuracy General in Moscow. By then, an Arkhangel'sk-based journalist had written several critical articles about the case, and her newspaper, Pravda severa, also hired a lawyer for Mikhailov. In November, Apanasenko appointed a second special investigator, who reached the same conclusions as his colleague. Once again, Apanasenko refused to send the conclusions to Moscow. During this time, Mikhailov's lawyer had written five complaints to the Procuracy General, which finally demanded to receive the case materials.

Subsequently, the Procuracy General appointed its own special investigator, Dmitrii Buianov, to the case, this time from neighboring Vologda province. In August 1998, this investigator told a representative of Human Rights Watch that he was absolutely convinced of Mikhailov's innocence. Shortly thereafter, he presented his conclusions to the head of the Vologda procuracy, who sent them to the Procuracy General in Moscow. Inexplicably, the Procuracy General considered Buianov's conclusions insufficient to request the Supreme Court to overturn Mikhailov's conviction. It sent the case back to Vologda in October 1998, claiming that "not all witnesses had been questioned." In January 1999, Buianov submitted his next conclusion to the Procuracy General, which apparently found it insufficient and returned it to him once more in April 1999. As of this writing, Buianov had sent the results of his latest investigation into the case, but the Procuracy General had not taken a decision yet.

Meanwhile, Mikhailov continues to be held on death row at the Arkhangel'sk pretrial detention center, where he has been for almost four and a half years. According to his lawyer, Mikhailov has tried to commit suicide several times. Both his lawyer and the special investigator Human Rights Watch spoke to expressed deep concern about his mental stability. As a death-row prisoner, Mikhailov does not have the right to receive visitors, except for his lawyer. From April 24, 1995 to July 1, 1997, Mikhailov had no exposure to sunlight, as death-row prisoners did not have the right to recreation. Human Rights Watch representatives met with Mikhailov briefly in August 1998, thanks to the special investigator from Vologda province. However, the representatives were forced to break off the meeting because prison authorities insisted that a guard be present at all times. Mikhailov appeared extremely distraught and depressed. Due to President Boris Yeltsin's initiative to commute the sentences of all remaining death row prisoners in June, Mikhailov's sentence was changed to twenty-five years of imprisonment. He is currently awaiting transfer to a labor colony.

Andrei Getsko—Bratsk
Police came to the apartment where Andrei Getsko was staying in Bratsk at 1:00 a.m., September 30, 1994, to detain him on suspicion of armed robbery. In a failed attempt to escape, Getsko jumped down from the balcony; he was detained after a police officer shot him in the foot. Police officers beat Getsko on the ride to the hospital, and continued to do so in the hospital elevator. He told Human Rights Watch: "They were beating me, I was on the floor, all covered in blood. The doors opened and the doctors entered the lift and said: ‘What are you doing here, who are you beating up? Animals!'" Police replied that they were carrying a "dangerous criminal" and refused to show their ID cards. The doctors took Getsko to an operating room and performed minor surgery on his foot.

Despite a doctor's instructions for Getsko to remain in the hospital, police took him to the police station immediately after the operation. Waiting for a car outside the hospital, officers kicked him in the injured foot. On arrival later that night at GOM 1, the main city police station in Bratsk, they reportedly resumed beating Getsko in an office on the second floor. According to his account, they put him on his stomach on a table, laid a thin file on him, and beat him with a crowbar over the file:

They brought in the crowbar, stretched me out over the table.... One stretched my legs, another my arms, they put a thin file on my back and started to beat me with the crowbar on the back, kidneys, lungs.... Then they started to beat me with a nightstick on the back, now without any files. That was on the table too. Two held me and two beat me.

Fearing that he would die or become crippled, Getsko said he eventually wrote a confession, which police officers dictated to him. He was subsequently sent to the prison hospital and then the SIZO (pretrial detention center) in Bratsk, where he spent three years awaiting trial hearings that were repeatedly suspended. With the help of a local human rights organization, Getsko was released on bail on September 16, 1997. In 1999, the procuracy dropped the criminal charges against Getsko.

Oleg Fetisov—Ekaterinburg
On November 21, 1996, police officers came to Fetisov's school during lunch break and told him to come to the police station. According to his account, the then fifteen-year-old Fetisov was taken to the Verkh Isetskii police station, where three police officers questioned him. When he refused to confess to stealing a jacket from another schoolboy, torture ensued. According to his account, police first beat him, kicked him, and dragged him around on the floor. Then they handcuffed him, tied him to a chair and put a gas mask over his head. They cut the oxygen supply several times for about a minute. Fetisov said he twice almost lost consciousness.

At approximately 3:00 p.m., three and a half hours after he arrived at the police station, Fetisov told his tormentors that he would write a confession. Police uncuffed his hands and gave him a pen and paper. When the officers' attention for Fetisov relented for a few moments, he got up and ran to the window. One of the police officers pulled his gun and threatened to shoot, but Fetisov jumped out.

Fetisov was taken to the hospital with a fractured skull, pelvic bone, and arm, a small cerebral hemorrhage, a damaged knee, and a concussion. Police failed to inform Fetisov's parents that they had detained the boy. In hospital Fetisov was in shock, but constantly repeated what had happened to him at the police station. Someone at the hospital obtained his parents' phone number and called them. Fetisov spent twenty-one days in the hospital and several more months at home recovering. He did not go back to jail.

Police continued to pursue the criminal case against Fetisov and his codefendants, who had both spent almost a year in detention (they were suspected of several more accounts of theft) by the time Human Rights Watch spoke to Fetisov. Hearings began in March 1998 and Fetisov and his codefendants were found guilty of robbery. Fetisov received a two-year suspended sentence.

Following Fetisov's jump, the procuracy investigated the incident and instituted criminal proceedings against Fetisov's torturers. At one point, the investigator reportedly told Fetisov's mother that he considered the police officers to be guilty of torture but said that the criminal case was now in the hands of his supervisors. The case against the police officers was subsequently delayed several times and then handed over to the procuracy of the Chkalovsk district of Ekaterinburg, ostensibly to ensure greater objectivity. That procuracy closed the criminal investigation after Fetisov refused to undergo a psychiatric assessment as his lawyer considered such an assessment to be irrelevant to the investigation against the police officers.

Oleg Igonin—Saransk
The torture death in 1995 of nineteen-year-old Oleg Igonin in Mordovia (See above, "Deaths in Custody and Permanent Injury") drew unprecedented attention from the Russian media, which followed the case, beginning with Igonin's death through to the historic conviction of several police officers for a range of related crimes three years later. On February 2, 1998, the Supreme Court of the Republic of Mordovia sentenced seven police officers, including officers Daev, Sazonov, and Guliaikin, to prison terms ranging from three to nine and a half years. The court found the policemen guilty of two episodes of torture under article 171(2) of the old criminal code.

Presiding Judge Vasilii Martyshkin issued, in addition to the verdict, a separate statement (chastnoe opredelenie) to the Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs accusing Mordovian police authorities of knowingly tolerating widespread torture practices in Mordovia. The statement castigated Mordovian police in particular for inaction on previous torture complaints against two of the convicted officers (Daev and Sazonov). Together with S. Antonov, in 1994 they had called three men to the police station for "informal questioning." In the course of this questioning, the policemen asphyxiated the three men and forced them to sit in the "konvertik" position while beating them. Police had suspected the men of having stolen a tractor. Judge Martyshkin's statement reads:

The procuracy of Saransk opened a criminal case under article 171(2) of the criminal code of the RSFSR against the criminal investigation officers [Daev and Sazonov] on June 7, 1994, about which the leadership of the MVD of Mordovia, the Bol'shebereznikvoskii and Lenin ROVD were informed. On July 25, 1995, investigator Savinov D.A. of the Saransk procuracy wrote the indictments against Daev, Sazonov, Antonov, Frolkin, and Tutaev.

However, despite the results of the investigation of the criminal case against Daev, Sazonov, Tutaev and Frolkin, the leadership of the Mordovian MVD did not take the necessary measures, including relieving [them] from [their] official positions. This carelessness and tolerance, the attempt to defend [the police officers] led to Daev and Sazonov committing an offence with even more grave results against minor Lavrent'ev A.S. and Igonin O.V.