He said to mercy

President Vladimir Putin pardoned the person around the “espionage” case Oksana Sevastidi, sentenced to seven years for SMS about military equipment in the city before the war in Georgia. The decree is published on the official portal of legal information.

"Guided by the principles of humanity, I decide to have a pardon of Sevastidi Oksana Valerievna, born in 1970, convicted on March 3, 2016 by the Krasnodar Regional Court, freeing her from further penalties in the form of imprisonment," the presidential decree said. The document comes into force five days after publication.

“Despite the pardon, we will seek the cancellation of the sentence and justification of Sevastidi, since this sentence is illegal in itself, and so it cannot be left,” said Evgeny Smirnov, lawyer Sevastidi.

On March 4, 2016, the judge of the Krasnodar Kraisud Vladimir Kobzev sentenced the Russian citizen Sevastidi to seven years in prison on charges of treason . However, her case became known only on December 1.

The reason for the criminal prosecution of Sevastidi was several SMS messages sent shortly before the war with Georgia in 2008. The woman wrote to the Georgian acquaintance that she saw a train with military equipment from the window of the minibus, going towards Abkhazia.

Lawyer Ivan Pavlov took upon himself the defense of the convict. According to him, the verdict describes in detail the events that preceded the war with Georgia. In particular, the document indicates the numbers of military units and types of equipment that was moved by rail. “From the point of view of the information significance and sensitivity of its SMS, if compared with the sentence, as a drop and the sea,” Pavlov emphasized.

As Pavlov noted, who defended the lawyer in the Sevastidi court, by agreement, Ruslan Zunnadzhyan was negligent to his duties. He filed an appeal for the verdict with a large violation of the deadline. Pavlov had to file a motion to restore the appeal.

On December 23, Putin at a press conference called the "unreasonably tough" verdict against Sevastidi. “In my opinion, indeed, this is a fairly tough approach. I honestly don’t know the details. But if she wrote something in her SMS messages, she wrote what she saw, everyone saw it, which means this was not a big secret,” Putin said. The president emphasized that he would try to figure out the case and "understand the essence" of the accusations.

On February 15, the Supreme Court had to consider Pavlov’s appeal to the Krasnodar Chrysud refusal to restore the appeal period for Sevastidi's sentence, missed by Zurnadzhyan. The convict itself was taken to hearings from IK-3 of the Ivanovo region in Kineshm. It is contained in the Lefortovo pre -trial detention center. However, the prosecutor petitioned the transfer of the meeting before the decision on Zurnadzhyan. The judges satisfied the petition.

On January 26, the Qualification Commission of the Law Chamber of the Krasnodar Territory came to the conclusion that Zurnadzhyan defended Sevastidi in violation of the norms of the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Code of Professional Ethics of Lawyers. On February 22, the Council of the Regional Lawyer Chamber issued a warning to the lawyer for improper defense of Sevastidi. The maximum sanction that threatened Zurnadzhyan for these violations is the deprivation of a lawyer status

On December 6, Pavlov said that in 2013-2016 in the Krasnodar Territory at least 10 people were convicted under Articles 275 (treason) and 276 of the Criminal Code (espionage). This is almost a quarter of the total number of sentences issued over the past four years in "espionage" cases throughout Russia. In total, since 2010, according to articles 275 and 276, 87 people were convicted in Russia. At the same time, 13 of them were in jail in January - June of this year. The individuals of half of the convicts are unknown.