Tag Criminal justice

Developments in the Markiv case

In October 2020, I learned about the trials of Vitaliy Markiv, the Ukrainian soldier accused by Italian prosecutors of murdering an Italian reporter in Donbas in 2014. In July 2019, Markiv was found guilty and sentenced by a first-level court…

Mironov, Rocchelli, Markiv

In January 2020, the Washington Post Magazine published a long article by Will Englund about Mironov and Rocchelli’s mission in Eastern Ukraine. Mironov was a Soviet dissident who was imprisoned in 1984-87 for distributing samizdat and having “contacts with foreigners.”…

Il processo Markiv

Suppose a prosecutor says: “I’ve proven A and B, therefore I’ve proven the defendant’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt.” Suppose the defense counters: “By law, you need to prove A, B, and C in order to establish guilt. Since you haven’t…

Fact-finding at the MH17 trial

The joint investigation team working on the case of Flight MH17, the civilian plane downed in Eastern Ukraine five years ago, has charged four people with the murder of the plane’s 298 passengers. Three of the accused are Russian nationals;…

Rwanda and Russia

Late in April, Rwanda’s Supreme Court struck down a law criminalizing “defamation, insults and cartooning public officials” but upheld the clause that made insulting the president a crime. (In addition, the court refused to decriminalize adultery.) Specifically, Article 154 criminalizes…

Slowly but surely

From Tuesday’s press release by the ECHR: In today’s Chamber judgment in the case of Navalnyy v. Russia… the European Court of Human Rights held, unanimously, that there had been: a violation of Article 5 (right to liberty and security),…

Another ECHR ruling in favor of Alexei Navalny

The ECHR’s Grand Chamber published its final judgment in Navalnyy v. Russia yesterday. The Russian opposition leader (whose last name is more often transliterated as Navalny, without the extra “y”) complained that his arrest, detention and administrative conviction on seven…

A New and Easy Method

Streetwise Professor (Craig Pirrong) explained spoofing on electronic exchanges in this post three years ago. Yesterday, he wrote about the US Department of Justice (DOJ) indicting a group of traders for alleged spoofing. The stunning part of the indictment is…

Scalia’s epistemology 3

It’s hard to argue against Lee Kovarsky‘s position that DNA fingerprinting offers a cognitive method so powerful that no sane person, not even a judge, can honestly ignore all the discoveries made through its application. It’s likewise impossible to accept…