Приговор при свечах / Judgment in candlelight - Владимир Анатольевич Арсентьев

in order to kill. In doing so, Klimov waded in the water and personally held Mangalov’s head below the surface until the victim stopped showing vital signs. In this way, Klimov and Mityukov intentionally killed Mangalov, whose death from drowning occurred at the scene immediately.

The court sentenced Klimov and Mityukov to long-term imprisonment in a high security penal colony for murder committed by a group of persons.[186]

The convicts did not agree with the verdict and appealed, citing that Mangalov didn’t show vitals because many people had beaten him up.

However, the Judicial Board on Criminal Cases of the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation left the district court verdict against Klimov and Mityukov unchanged, dismissing their cassation appeals.[187]

Dr. Kevin Dutton, a psychologist from Oxford, UK, discovered a fascinating trend. In fact, psychopathy allows predicting the success of a crime. Mental state in its broad sense is the ability to cognitively and emotionally perceive what is happening with other people. It cannot be said that psychopaths never feel worried – they are just blind to danger. They focus their whole attention on the task at hand, ruthlessly filtering out all external distractions. Psychopaths are also finely tuned to elicit vulnerabilities. In the course of experiments, they were better at identifying assault victims than non-psychopaths, and they based their choice simply on the way someone walked. One could say they could “smell blood.”[188]

3.3. The Reprisal

The judge arrived to the central town of a national district and took up the criminal case against Dziuban, who was charged with murder reportedly committed in a desolate village. The defendant suffered from moderate alcohol addiction and showed signs of organic personality disorder with mental disturbances, which, however, did not hinder her ability to recognize the factual character of her acts and control her behavior.

Dziuban pleaded guilty during the trial. She told that on the evening of March 14, after drinking alcohol with Zharov in her home, she doused him with gasoline and set him on fire with matchsticks while he was sleeping. She said the gasoline was from a can she kept in her pantry.

Since March 11, she was drinking together with her brother, Redkin. She developed personal hostility toward him and desired to kill him. On March 17, they were drinking and quarrelling again. She waited until her brother fell asleep on the couch and around 1 p.m. brought a gas can from the pantry. She doused his whole body in gasoline, lit a piece of newspaper, and set her brother on fire. He burst into flames immediately, jumped up, and ran outside. He fell down on the front porch, and after a while, the flame went out. She dragged him into the house and dumped into the basement.

Zharov told that he came over to see Glukhov, Dziuban’s husband, and brought a bottle of vodka. During their drinking session, Zharov fell asleep on the couch. Dziuban doused him with gasoline and set him on fire. He stormed out of the house, fell into the snow and managed to put out the fire. Dziuban was laughing at him while he was burning. Then he took off his burnt pants and jacket and ran home.

Zharov sustained heat burns of buttocks and lower limbs, caused by high temperatures, which resulted in moderate bodily injury. The paramedic sent him to the hospital, worrying about blood poisoning.

Dziuban’s daughters saw her mother douse a sleeping Zharov with gasoline and set him on fire, and then they saw him run. They told that their mother also doused Redkin, sleeping on the same couch, with gasoline and lit him up using a piece of newspaper. Redkin ran outside to the front porch and fell down. The older girl called the paramedic, who arrived and called the police.

In the presence of the paramedic, police officers found Redkin’s scorched body in the basement. He was lying in the boxer’s pose with his legs up the stairs and his head down. As Redkin was still showing vitals, he was taken to the hospital, where he died on the same night.

The cause of death was body burns that resulted in severe burn shock, causing cardio-respiratory arrest and central nervous system shutdown. The heat burns found on the body were caused by exposure to high temperatures. Redkin suffered particularly severe pain, and his injuries were incompatible with life. The surgeon reported that Redkin’s burn wound occupied the entire surface of his body and limbs except the dorsum of his right foot. The wound bed was boiled muscle tissue.

The defendant’s mother, sister, and husband all refused to testify in court.

Having reviewed the case on the merits, the court consisting of a single judge established the following facts. On the evening of March 14, Dziuban, drunk in her home, out of personal hostility decided to inflict fire injury on Zharov, with whom she had an argument.

Dziuban waited until Zharov fell asleep drunk on the couch. She poured into a jar a mixture of AI-80 gasoline and motor base oil from the canister in her pantry. To inflict severe pain – that is, with particular cruelty – Dziuban doused the sleeping man with the highly flammable liquid from her jar and lit him on fire. The clothes on Zharov’s body started burning. Zharov, covered in flames, ran outside, fell into the snow, and put out the fire on his own, ripping off his clothes.

Thus, Dziuban intentionally inflicted on Zharov heat burns of buttocks and lower limbs resulting in bodily injury qualified as moderate because Zharov’s impairment lasted over three weeks.

Redkin, Dziuban’s younger brother, had been staying at his sister’s place since March 9. Since March 11, they had been drinking together. They developed animosity toward one another, and for that reason, Dziuban during an argument decided to inflict death on her brother by burning him alive.

On March 17 around 1 p.m.,