Приговор при свечах / Judgment in candlelight - Владимир Анатольевич Арсентьев

That was exactly what happened. The collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and the establishment of the Russian Federation in 1991 were followed by the introduction of a new economic system based on enforcement of ownership. The judicial reform, being part of the new societal and political order, maximally increased criminal liability in 1996. At the end of 2001, distorting the human right to a fair trial, the possibility of delivering a guilty verdict without court proceedings was reanimated as special judicial procedure, in which the basic principles of judicature are rejected. The procedure requires that the accused should agree with the charges and/or be ready to cooperate.

Along with special procedure, there still remained standard procedure, “uncomfortable” and cumbersome for the state, requiring strict observation of judicial principles, including the rules of presumption of innocence – the essence of justice. Only standard procedure allows for civil control over the activities of the judiciary during open, public, and oral court proceedings and during the public pronouncement of the judgment. Meanwhile, a guilty verdict delivered under special procedure contains no proof of guilt, as there is no evidentiary court process. The discovery, recording, and removal of trace evidence, accompanied with its due processing, presentation in the case documents, and demonstration at trial, remain beyond public judicial verification. Professional knowledge and skills of proper pre-trial and judicial investigation are lost. Instead, the process relies on arbitrary command, which, according to Immanuel Kant, denies self-examination as the reason’s justified demand.[245] Thus, the person’s identity is destroyed.

In early 21st century there were still places around the Lake of Baikal untouched by technology. They attracted people with nature’s gifts, which is what those poor comers lived off of. Two such berry-pickers, sitting at a bonfire, were approached by Kolodin, who had an axe in his waistband. The two men invited him to join, but according to Kolodin, insulted him in some way. When they fell asleep at the bonfire, Kolodin hacked their heads off with his axe. He hid one head in a tree hollow and buried the other under the same tree.

Kolodin first told about that murder and its details in court, where he was tried for two murders. He had been brought before the same court before – for robbery with violence and later for murder. He did not conceal the circumstances of his most recent crime and told the court that Galkina invited him to her home where she lived with her partner Palkin. The three of them drank alcohol for several days. They got in an argument because of Palkin’s jealousy, which is when Kolodin took his axe and killed Palkin and then Galkina. He tried to cut their heads off, but wasn’t strong enough.

Kolodin’s confession of murdering two men in the forest was sent from the court to the prosecutor. After the court verdict for the murder of Galkina and Palkin duly entered into force, the judge asked the prosecutor about the progress on the verification of Kolodin’s statement about his crime. The prosecutor said that Kolodin refused to cooperate, and that was the end of it.

The impotence of will in the absence of opportunity for coercion or violence exposes an extreme lack of respect to oneself and others, as well as the inability to fight for truth – for the triumph of good. The human being draws opportunities from freedom, which is having power over oneself. However, fearing the freedom of the self, one chooses not freedom but slumber – chains one’s own mind, as put by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).

The matter is, as Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) shows in his theory of morality, that “since in human beings any good is always deficient, the law – made intuitive by an example – still always strikes down my pride. The standard for this is provided by the man whom I see before me; what impurity may still attach to him is not so familiar to me as is my own, and he therefore appears to me in a purer light. Respect is a tribute that, whether we want to or not, we cannot refuse [to pay] to merit; we may perhaps hold it back outwardly, yet we cannot help feeling it anyway.

“So little is respect a feeling of pleasure that we give way to it only reluctantly in regard to a human being. We try to discover something [in him] that could lighten the burden of it for us, some blemish to compensate us for the humiliation that comes upon us through such an example. Even the deceased are not always safe from [this kind of] critique.”[246]

Thus, lack of respect is a greed of the arrogant person and a cowardice to discover one’s deplorable position.

4.3. Myth and Reality

In his conversation with Dionysius, Plato was proving that tyrants are the poorest in courage, because they hold power over others only by fear and are themselves in fear of every human being. When the conversation turned to the subject of fairness, it was discovered that only fair people are worthy of true happiness, while unfairness is nothing short of misfortune. When asked who was the happiest man, Plato answered without hesitation that it was Socrates. Judges, even fair ones, are like tailors whose business is to mend ripped clothes. A tyrant is the most fearful man in the world, because he trembles before his barber, afraid to be slashed with the razor. For such rhetoric Dionysius ordered to sell Plato into slavery on the island of Aegina.

Plato was convinced that not only lawlessness and corruption but mainly insolent ignorance gives rise to all sorts of evil, which brings forth most bitter fruit