Приговор при свечах / Judgment in candlelight - Владимир Анатольевич Арсентьев

getaway. They were chased by an athletic female victim, who looked like quite a fighter and obviously had had police training. She was a bit blubbered but determined, ready to stop a horse at full gallop. It was not difficult to guess that the poor thieves, running for their lives, were facing a beating and a sentence as a result of special procedure, that is, double punishment, which is illegal. Do the retired, then, have to protect the motherland?

The peculiar mutation of the rights of the accused in the criminal process was, in my opinion, caused by the system’s refusal to fill the form of positive law with its appropriate natural law content. That was no longer necessary, because the special procedure to produce a guilty verdict without trial figuratively put all participants in the proceedings in the same row. The judge, prosecution, and defense found themselves in the same line of fire, as the procedure of proving guilt, involving all of them, became redundant. The accused persons, who are essentially considered innocent until the court judgment of guilty enters into due force, became doomed to punishment as they sign a contract with the state, agreeing with the charges or consenting to cooperate. The state does not guarantee a fair trial anymore, as the legislator abolished it under special procedure.

Meanwhile, a unique historical and jurisprudential fact is that there were twenty-five persons in my judicial practice charged with banditry, the elements of which crime were, in fact, not found after full and thorough judicial investigation. For that reason, the charge of banditry was dropped for 25 innocent people, and 25 incontestable acquittals entered into due force – after each verdict was protested against by the prosecutor and then reviewed by the higher judicial authority according to appropriate procedure. Total lack of substantiation for as many as twenty-five accusations of banditry, all in the practice of a single federal judge, undermines the legal arguments in favor of special procedure without trial regarding any category of offenses.

This futility of efforts on the part of investigative and prosecutorial authorities, revealed by the court in a fair trial that principally observes human and citizen rights, clearly shows the independence of the judge and his subjection only to the federal law and the Constitution of the Russian Federation. His long-standing activity, in which he delivered 676 just verdicts, is an impartial indicator that Russia’s judicial system can be strategically developed to the benefit of humans and citizens, in respect for their rights and freedoms. One of every four defendants (in my jurisdiction) in the 21st century was acquitted because of being fully or partly innocent of the crimes.

Being a representative of the judicial power in those criminal cases, the judge fulfilled the state’s obligations with respect to its citizens, as set out in Article 2 of the Constitution of Russia, in order to naturally maintain peace. Thus, the prerogative of ontological choice in favor of the innocent person justified the judicial activities and informed them with ideal meaning, as the perfectly balanced principles of justice were implemented, formulated in the strategy of natural law.

According to Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), German philosopher, psychologist, and psychiatrist, natural law is “confined to the ordering of existence. Its end-purpose is always a relative one, that of the ordering of existence, but from the motive of the absolute end-purpose of authentic and complete humanity in the world.”[248] The prominent 20th century thinker believed that natural law had long attempted to bring to light the common characteristics that unite all people. Natural law defines human rights and strives to create an authority within the world order that would protect each individual from state violence by effective legal processes under the aegis of sovereignty of all humanity. Total state and total war are contrary to natural law and lead to the abolishment of human rights.

That is why it is so important to consider the personal experience of delivering justice as a result of judicial discretion rooted in freedom of conscience and thought. Such experience points to the source of independence in the very human nature, because freedom of conscience and thought is everyone’s natural right. At the same time, that experience contributes to the development and improvement of the judicial system as a whole.

Human existence in the world has led to the necessary exercise of the principle of presumption of innocence, expounded upon in the framework of natural law that is based on the contract between the individual and the state for legal protection. The contract is rooted in personal sovereignty, which arises from the inalienable human rights and freedoms. By fulfilling the terms of that contract, my personal practice integrated into the national criminal justice experience for a quarter century. This was facilitated by justices of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, who legally shared my responsibility for the judgments, as well as the President of Russia, who personally examined a final court ruling (that I had written and announced) and pardoned the convicted citizen in accordance with the law. Thus, divergence in interpretation implies fundamental differences in mentality.

4.4. The Motto Idea

Socrates taught Plato to respect people who strove for knowledge and moral perfection. According to the 20th century thinker Aleksei Fedorovich Losev (1893–1988), all human history is a quest for freedom, a life “striving for freedom,” where not labor or creativity is most important but freedom as the result of labor. However, that does not mean that everyone is free. They are not; but everyone strives for freedom, so “every single moment of human life is impossible without the sense of freedom.” The human being has to obey that necessity, but it is no external violence – instead, it is “my last and utmost internal wish.”

Was it the freedom brought forth by creative labor – by a “life impulse” that was Losev’s life – that made him take the