Приговор при свечах / Judgment in candlelight - Владимир Анатольевич Арсентьев

person, in a helpless state; murder committed with the purpose of concealing another crime; and collusion. Besides, the court found that Baranovich did not strangle Sazonov’s neck with a shoelace and Huang did not do the same with an electric cord in the watch house. Those charges were struck from the verdict. The court also took into account the opinion of the state prosecuting attorney – prosecutor K. – on those issues.

After his verdict was pronounced, Huang punched through the door of the courtroom while being convoyed out. During the trial, he was hovering above the floor, climbing up the vertical bars and trying to break free.

As Huang and Baranovich pleaded not guilty, they appealed against the verdict.

The Judicial Board on Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation left the provincial court verdict against Huang and Baranovich unchanged, dismissing the cassation appeals of the convicted persons.[156]

According to Robert Hare, antisocial personality disorder in prison inmates is considered a psychiatric equivalent of the common cold, as 80–85 % inmates meet the criteria for that diagnosis. Only 20 % inmates fall within the definition of a psychopath. However, the crimes committed by this minority are substantially more serious. About 50 % of the most serious crimes (like murders or serial rapes) were committed by psychopaths.[157]

2.3. The Precedent

December just started, and the people’s assessor – a retired local geologist – warned the judge to take the plane home before the end of the week. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be able to leave the town until next year, as nonflying weather was on the way – freezing temperatures and fog. However, one could also get out of the town by a dangerous winter road – the trip would take two days. In several years, the judge’s younger brother, a judge of the same rank in the same court, will be taking that road to the “big land.” At the earliest climatic opportunity, he will conduct an exhumation in the permafrost and identify the murder weapon – a knife. Experts will find microparticles of that knife’s blade in the robbery victim’s distinctive skull injury[158]—which will allow the court to deliver a lawful, reasonable, and just verdict.

This was preceded by my experience as an investigator who solved a grave crime in the 24 hours on duty.

On November 22, 1987, the on-duty investigator deployed to the scene. According to the message from the hospital, the victim suffered a grave, life-threatening bodily injury, namely a penetrating wound to the stomach. The investigator found the wooden two-story apartment building and started examining the crime scene – the hallway on the first floor – together with attesting witnesses. The painted wooden floor by the window was covered in liquid that looked like blood. It was evident that two persons had been shifting their feet on that spot. Both sets of footprints led to the house of the victim; from there, the ambulance had taken him to the hospital. Then the footprints of a single person brought the investigator and attesting witnesses to an apartment in another house, where they discovered clothes and footwear stained with what looked like blood.

On the inside of the front door, roughly at head level, the investigator noticed a fresh cut, as though made with a knife blade. The landlady told that Sergeyev came, changed his clothes, and left the apartment stabbing the door with a knife. In the witnesses’ presence, the investigator got a mold off of the cut using playdough and put it in a matchbox.

The investigator extracted more proof in the presence of the witnesses. He sampled blood stains from the floor and windowsill in the hallway, from the front porch, from the apartment where they found Sergeyev’s clothes and footwear, from the clothes and footwear themselves, and from the mold he took off of the cut on the front door. All of the samples matched the victim’s blood.

Sergeyev was arrested on the same night. During the interrogation, he told the investigator that he had an altercation with the victim, as they were standing by the window in the hallway. He stabbed him in the stomach with the knife and took the wounded man home. Then he went to his father’s apartment, where he changed and left the clothes stained in the victim’s blood. Leaving the apartment, he entered into a quarrel with the landlady and violently stuck the knife in the door with a downward movement.

Just as the investigator supposed, some blood from the blade remained in the cut on the wooden door. Thus, he implemented the forensic methods of discovery, documentation, and extraction of crime traces, eventually coming to an educated guess and creating a precedent. Those methods also became the subject of his 1986 thesis, which echoed after several years when he was reviewing a similar paper working as a people’s judge.

The same winter, the investigator was confidently going down a footpath, following the blood trail from a knife attack scene. Passing several private wooden houses, he reached a crossing with a similar footpath leading to the closest house. He highlighted the ground with his flashlight and saw that the blood trail turned that way.

He followed the trail to the house. The mistress of the house couldn’t understand why he came. On the front porch, the investigator found a similar drop of the already frozen liquid that looked like blood. The anxious woman scraped off the proof with her fingernail, tasted it, and invited the investigator to do so, too, sticking it under his nose. She explained that she worked in a canteen and had sledged home a canister of leftovers that night. Some borscht had spilled over on her way…

The investigator had to chase down Sergeyev again when he escaped from prison. He was among the ten inmates who ran away from a holding cell several times over its capacity – stuffed to suffocation with 33