Together with the hand of a sobering-up patient

The Novosibirsk Regional Court rejected the cassation appeal of former employee of the sobering-up center Viktor Gudimov. At the end of last year, the court of the Sovetsky district of Novosibirsk admitted that a police sergeant broke the patient’s arm, and sentenced him to three years probation. The policeman himself called the incident at the medical facility an “accident.”

As Tatyana Solomatova, prosecutor of the cassation department of the Novosibirsk regional prosecutor's office, told Kommersant, yesterday a panel of the regional court considered the cassation appeal of a 28-year-old former employee of the sobering-up center No. 1 of the Internal Affairs Directorate for the Sovetsky District, Viktor Gudimov, against the sentence handed down to him on December 7 last year. As follows from the verdict, on August 6, 2008, a resident of Akademgorodok Braginets was drinking at home, but, feeling a lack of alcohol, decided to go for beer. At the kiosk he fell into the hands of a police patrol, who took Mr. Braginets to a sobering-up center.

There, the paramedic asked the detainee to undress, but he refused and, according to witness testimony, began to behave defiantly - “shouted, threatened, demanded beer.” When the police began to remove the patient’s outer clothing, Viktor Gudimov, the sobering-up center on duty, gave Braginets a painful hold - he twisted his arm behind his back. Hearing a crunch, the staff of the institution took the detainee to the central clinical hospital. Traumatologists determined that the victim had a comminuted fracture of his arm with displacement. Braginets was operated on and a fixing plate was installed at the fracture site.

In relation to Sergeant Gudimov, the investigative department of the Investigative Committee at the Prosecutor's Office of the Russian Federation for the Novosibirsk Region opened a criminal case for abuse of power with the use of violence

(Part 3 of Article 286 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The policeman himself “qualified” the incident at the medical facility as an “accident.” The court found the sergeant guilty, noting in the decision that “refusal to undress independently is not a violation of order that requires the use of physical force to suppress.” After weighing the arguments of the parties, the judge sentenced the sergeant to three years of suspended imprisonment, and Gudimov was deprived of the right to hold positions in law enforcement agencies for one and a half years. During the trial, the victim's civil claim against the policeman was partially satisfied. True, the amount of 200 thousand rubles that Mr. Braginets asked to recover for moral damages was considered by the court to be “overstated”, reducing the amount of the claim fourfold. In addition, during the trial, the policeman had already paid the victim 50 thousand rubles.

In a cassation appeal sent to the regional court, the former policeman insisted that he did not commit a crime. The victim, in turn, asked to review the court decision and increase compensation. According to the press secretary of the regional court, Irina Kosheleva, in terms of the imposed punishment, a panel of three judges left the sentence unchanged. The court will consider the civil claim of the victim anew.

Konstantin Voronov, Novosibirsk

The policeman ruined his career