In 1913 Russia, a criminal trial was an inquiry before a
jury into the facts of the case. It was
not preceded by sifting the evidence to make sure that only provable facts were
presented at trial. It did not, as you
read last week, eliminate rumor or gossip.
The inquiry system required going through the material
presented in the indictment, putting the named witnesses on the stand, and
having them speak their piece. Then the
attorneys asked questions to trip them up or, in a last ditch, appealed to
their depositions. You, the juror, had to
evaluate who probably told the truth.
This went to an extreme in the expert testimony, which was
the only testimony allowed on the ritual murder charge. The attorneys were required not to question
the expert witnesses as if they didn’t believe the testimony. They had to ask questions designed to bring
out details that, as non-experts, they could not understand. When it got to the second charge, ritual
murder, you, the juror, were perfectly free to decide which witnesses you liked better
because it was all a case of he-said, he-said.
In both phases of the trial, the attorneys
could not ask questions that were not represented by evidence in the
indictment. There were two exceptions to
this rule; if the prosecutors slipped up and asked such a question, the defense
could also treat it in their followup (they always got the last word). The other was that if the witness volunteered
information, both parties could follow it up.
So. Trial by
inqury. It goes like this.
On day 2, Aleksandra Prikhodko, Andrey’s mother, reveals
that evidence in the trial was faked because she was given suspenders that she
knew weren’t Andrey’s. They were adult
size and Andrey wasn’t wearing his own suspenders because they were too tight.
On day 7, Gulko the harness maker says he and his tools weren't at the factory when Andrey was killed. He also says he left his shvaiki, the supposed murder weapon, at
the factory at the end of April and just somehow knew he was going to work in future at places where they would give him tools.
On day 9, Gulko’s shvaiki are shown to the jury as
physical evidence, but in the afternoon the jury finds out that Mishchuk was
tried on a charge of faking this as evidence.
On day 10, Gorbatko, the other harness maker, identifies the
shvaiki Mishchuk “faked” as definitely Gulko’s.
On day 14 or 15, Krasovsky says that Gulko’s shvaiki
were never involved with the case in the first place. When he showed them to Tufanov, one of the
doctors who performed the second autopsy, that doctor denied they were involved
in the autopsy.
On day 22, Tufanov says that for purpose of the autopsy,
they bought a set of shvaiki in the Galitsky marketplace to test in
Andrey’s wounds to see if they would fit.
Could you remember all of that and take it into
consideration during your deliberations with the rest of the jury? You had to listen to 28 days
of this kind of thing, back and forth, true or not, with absolute lying
revealed on the witness stand.
I was there. I
translated every word of the transcript.
There were times I was so tired and my hands hurt so bad from the typing that I just bagged the work for the
day. But at least I could get up and go
work in the garden or make a batch of bread or some brownies or go shopping or
something. You, the juror, were condemned to sit
there hour after hour, 14 hours a day, for 34 straight days, so you wouldn’t
miss a word, true or not. You were also
sequestered. No newspapers, no plays at
the theater, no concerts, no nothing.
I couldn’t keep it straight without notes that I made and
then developed into The Anvil, a “murder mystery” version. Now imagine that you have a 6th
grade education, maybe not even that.
How do you keep track of the players and their lies?
I believe that the kindest evaluation is, that the
government relied on this situation when it empaneled 12 peasants, and excused
the only prospective juror with a high school education. The plan was probably that the jury would
throw up its hands in confusion and vote the way their masters wanted. Even with the obvious
falsehoods in the testimony.
Didn’t happen. Half
the jury voted to acquit, and half to convict, and Russian law said that
required the court to acquit Beilis.
The urban legend is that on the ritual murder charge, the jury voted their
prejudices saying that Andrey’s death was ritual murder, although they couldn’t
say who committed it, and after 20 days of evidence that Vera Cheberyak and her gang murdered Andrey -- and none of them were Jews. Or did they? For that, you will have to read "Endgame".
In November 1913, Chaplinsky started another ritual murder
case in Fastow, 50 miles west of Kiev, and went into the same program of faking
the evidence. Can you say “stupid”? In February 1914, he and all the other Kiev
regional officials who went along with him on this were replaced. The real murderer, Ivan Goncharuk, was
convicted in February 1915.
There is much more to the Beilis case than what I have shown
in these introductory posts. It is so
complex that in the posts for the actual translation of the transcript, I
include only a summary and a list of witnesses. Then
there’s a link to the translation for the courageous. Or curious.
Or people who have an interest in the details of the case but can’t read
Russian.
The Anvil includes what I think the real story of the
murder was, and the story of the "Baron von Munchausen" of the case who was
everywhere for the whole time the case went on, and who never testified either
by deposition or on the witness stand, for the very good reason that he knew
everything. He got out of town the day
before the trial started, and I have no doubt at all that the government helped
with that. You can contact me if you’re
interested in reading this version, which is about as long as a Harlequin
novel.
We’ll see who is interested in what.
For now, if you get anything out of these summary posts, or
the murder mystery, or the translation, I hope it will be that no nation can
run anything the way the Tsarist government ran the Beilis case and still claim
to have a “legal system” or a “system of justice.” The demonstrations and strikes that went on
through the end of the Beilis trial showed that some Russians felt that
way. The fact that the Romanovs had to
get help from foreign troops, and still couldn’t hold onto their throne, showed
that far too many Russians felt that way about everything the Romanovs did from
1905 through 1917. The fact that Russia
staged a case all too similar to the Beilis case in 2012, when the punk band
Pussy Riot was tried on two charges that weren’t in the Russian criminal code
at the time, shows that Russia, among others, still doesn’t get it.For those of you who read this through to the end, here is the link to "Endgame".
© Patricia Jo Heil, 2013-2018 All Rights Reserved
No comments:
Post a Comment