A. Verkhovsky. Commentary on the examination of E. Kiryukhina

The text of the expertise in the case of the attack on T. Karimov has been published - see website . on the Open Agency

From this text it becomes clearer what are the errors of the investigation and the expert.

Firstly, the case was opened on infliction of grievous bodily harm out of hooligan motives (par. "d" part 2 of article 111 of the Criminal Code), and the investigator, by his question, clearly found out the possibility of adding article 282 of the Criminal Code to the charge. Meanwhile, the circumstances of the case (testimonies of witnesses) speak primarily of an attack motivated by national hatred (of the choice of victims on ethnic grounds), and not of an act of hate propaganda, i.e. the case should have been reclassified as paragraph "e" of the same part of the same article. And for this, no linguistic expertise would be required.

The question of whether there was precisely public incitement of hatred depends on the assessment of the situation at the time of the beating: how many witnesses were present, whether they could hear and heard the screams of the attackers. Depending on this, you can think about the prosecution under Article 282 of the Criminal Code.

Moreover, the investigator was not supposed to put a question to the expert in this way (see page 2 of the examination), in fact repeating the disposition of Article 282 of the Criminal Code, and the expert was not entitled to answer such a question, since the examination cannot concern the legal qualification of the act, but only the areas of expertise of an expert (in this case, linguistics).

Secondly, the expert, speaking about the contextual dependence of the meaning of slogans like "Beat the chumps!" , used material from printed and online materials that had nothing to do with the situation of a fight, and transferred his conclusion to the situation of a fight without the slightest arguments in favor of this (p. 11).

We will leave on the expert's conscience a completely arbitrary set of definitions that he uses in his work (even the slang meaning of the word "chump" is obviously incomplete - see p. 7), especially since these definitions are not actually used by the expert further.

Thirdly, the conclusions of the examination have little to do with its main text. The first conclusion refers to the "direction of public appeals" such as "Kill khacha!" . Prior to that, in the examination, the situation was not at all considered as public. And the linguist expert did not present any arguments in favor of the fact that such calls in the situation of beating by Russians (by self-presentation) of non-Russians (by the assessment of the attackers and witnesses and, probably, by self-identification) are not aimed at inciting hatred in the witnesses of the beating. This issue should be re-examined by the investigation in terms of bringing charges under item "a" part 2 of article 282 of the Criminal Code.

The second conclusion contains a fantastic and also unmotivated statement that in the described situation of beating the slogan "Russia for the Russians!" does not degrade the dignity of a person, for example - a victim, "on the basis of nationality, origin" .

Thus, the investigation initially took the wrong path and turned to the expert with the wrong and even illegal question. However, in such a situation, the very need for an examination looks very doubtful.

The expert, for his part, presented at least a completely unconvincing text, which should have prompted the investigation to no longer resort to the services of such an expert.