You need to be softer

On April 21, strangely on the same day when the decision was made to grant parole to former Yukos lawyer Svetlana Bakhmina, a plenum of the Supreme Court was held, dedicated precisely to the practice of granting parole.

As the Vedomosti newspaper wrote on April 28, citing the text of the resolution, courts should not refuse to grant parole without reason. In particular, the convict’s non-admission of guilt should not serve as a basis for refusal, nor should the presence of penalties from the administration of the places of detention (the newspaper recalls that this was one of the grounds for denying parole to the former head of Yukos, Mikhail Khodorkovsky).

The investigation of the circumstances relating to the petition of the convicted person must be comprehensive and complete, the resolution says, and the decision must contain a detailed justification for the conclusions reached by the court.

Last year, the Zubovo-Polyansky court in Mordovia, which twice denied Bakhmina parole, did the same with 166 out of 299 applications for parole filed by women, and at least half of the applications were filed by women with children.