Verdict on Soviet Justice

By Patricia Blake

An exiled defense lawyer publishes the first major insider's view

For 37 years Dina Kaminskaya was a familiar and respected figure in Moscow's crowded old courthouses and in the vast corridors of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union's Russian Republic. The diminutive (5 ft.) defense lawyer packed more energy and determination into preparing her cases than many an unwary prosecutor, complacent in the knowledge that in the U.S.S.R. the law is stacked against the defense. That was the prosecutors' mistake. Kaminskaya obtained acquittals in more than 100 criminal cases.

A legend among prisoners in the Gulag, Kaminskaya was said to have the eloquence to move the most stonyhearted judge to render a merciful decision. Her scrupulous and exhaustive presentations earned praise even from Communist Party-controlled jurists at the top of her profession. In an official 1959 book entitled The Moscow Bar, she was acclaimed as "a well-known forensic orator capable of combining deep-felt emotionalism that stirs in her hearers solicitude for the fate of the defendant with the faculty of sober, logical analysis."

All that changed in 1967, as Kaminskaya recounts in an engrossing new book, Final Judgment (Simon & Schuster; $18.95). In that year she made the fateful decision to represent the Soviet Union's most outspoken dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, who had been charged with organizing a demonstration in Moscow's Pushkin Square. Kaminskaya boldly pleaded for acquittal, partly on the ground that Bukovsky had the right to demonstrate under the Soviet constitution. The legal community was shocked that she had invoked the constitution--a tactic that is taboo in political cases. In practice, the basic civil rights guaranteed by the constitution have proved to be mere window dressing in a totalitarian society.

Kaminskaya continued to represent dissidents during the next decade, thus falling deeper into official disfavor. Neither her logic nor her famed oratory proved sufficient to win an acquittal in a single political case. After being harassed by the Soviet secret police, Kaminskaya and her husband Konstantin Simis, also a lawyer, were summarily ordered to leave the U.S.S.R. in 1977.

The couple settled in Arlington, Va., where Kaminskaya wrote Final Judgment. It is the first major insider's account of the Soviet criminal-justice system. Most revealing--and surprising--are her descriptions of how justice often prevails in criminal cases, in spite of a judiciary that is lacking in independence.

Kaminskaya's most significant criminal case is both a lesson in unfamiliar Soviet legal procedure and a riveting mystery thriller. In 1967 the parents of a 16-year-old boy, Sasha, engaged her to represent him in a sensational case. Sasha and his pal Alik had been charged with the rape and murder of their classmate Marina in a village outside Moscow. During six months of pretrial detention the boys had confessed, then recanted. The prosecution's star witness was an old woman who claimed to have heard Marina cry out as the three youngsters passed under her window: "Alik! Leave me alone! Sasha, let go!" The case against the boys had been prepared by an ambitious senior investigator from the procuracy, the Soviet equivalent of the prosecutor's office.

Kaminskaya's first meeting with Sasha convinced her that he and Alik were innocent. She quickly discovered the reasons they had confessed. Among them: Sasha had been put into a cell with a horribly scarred adult inmate who told him that if he did not confess he would be sent to a notorious prison where guards and convicts alike would beat him up. Alik had been given a similar cell mate.

Kaminskaya found that in addition the investigator had fabricated evidence. Visiting the scene of the crime, she discovered that the boys could not have attacked Marina where the investigator said they did. The site, near a pond, had been awash in mud on the day of the murder, but the boys had been seen clean and dry shortly after they had allegedly committed the crime.

During the boys' six-week trial, Kaminskaya's new evidence impressed the court, which referred the case for further investigation. Still, the court at the second trial pronounced Sasha and Alik guilty (there are no juries in the Soviet Union). Undeterred, Kaminskaya and Alik's advocate both appealed; once again the case was referred for investigation. A third trial ensued, this time before the Supreme Court of the Russian Republic. The evidence that the boys were innocent was overwhelming. Among other things, the defense established that the old woman who claimed to have heard Marina cry out was deaf; she had also been at work, not listening at her window, on the day of the murder. Evidence was introduced that witnesses had been suborned. The judge visited the scene of the crime to satisfy himself that the boys could not have committed it. The verdict: not guilty.

Sitting in the living room of her modest two-story house in Arlington, Kaminskaya widens her piercing blue eyes at the memory of her victory in the courtroom 14 years ago. The 63-year-old advocate brought to America a treasured photo of Sasha, grown up, that is touchingly inscribed to her. But she has other, tragic memories of the dissidents she could not save from injustice: Yuri Galanskov, who died of mistreatment in the Gulag; Ilya Gabay, who killed himself in despair; Anatoli Marchenko, who was sent back to the camps for ten years after three terms of imprisonment and exile.

She has no regrets that she defended such clients, even though her career was destroyed and she was forced into exile. "I did it out of moral conviction and a simple sense of professional duty," she says. "Basically, I attempted to act as if I were a free person in a free country." In the Soviet Union, that attempt is itself a formidable achievement. --By Patricia Blake This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.