Convicted Killer Had 'Typical Russian Trial'

November 1989 was freezing in Magnitogorsk, but it was fear, not the cold, that kept people locked up in their houses. A dozen girls had been raped or murdered or both throughout the year in the elevators of apartment buildings. A protracted investigation had yielded no results. People were on edge, organizing night watches and publicly slamming the authorities for their inaction.

One night during that month, Dmitry Gridin stood in the entryway of an apartment building in the Urals city. A girl came in and went into an elevator. He followed.

The subsequent events brought Gridin, now 32, to death row and, later, to uncharted territory as the first Russian to win a case against his country in the UN Human Rights Committee. In a potentially precedent-setting decision, the committee ruled this summer that Russia severely violated Gridin's right to a fair trial and urged it to set him free.

Sitting on a rickety chair in a small office in a high-security prison in the Vologda region, Gridin recently recalled the events leading to his arrest for crimes he says he did not commit.

He maintains that he went into the apartment building that night simply to take shelter from the cold. He said he got into the elevator because he decided it would be warmer on the upper floors.

"When I entered the elevator my glasses got steamed up," Gridin said, his cuffed hands resting in his lap. "I tried to take them off. She must have thought I wanted to attack her and started screaming. I ran out of the elevator, lost both my hat and my glasses."

Twenty minutes later police found Gridin on a tram and arrested him.

That was on Friday. By Sunday he had confessed to nine assaults, including three murders. What came between could be a law professor's guide for how not to conduct a criminal investigation. Investigators questioned Gridin without a lawyer present, denied him food and would not allow him to sleep ?€” all the while pressuring him to testify against himself.

"They told me if I refused to admit my guilt they would make sure I got sentenced to death, and if I admitted to the crimes they would make sure I only get 10 to 15 years in jail," he shrugs. "I was terrified and decided to cooperate."

Gridin was sentenced to death, but in 1993 President Boris Yeltsin commuted the sentences of all prisoners on death row to life imprisonment.

During the months-long investigation, Gridin was systematically beaten by cellmates, one of whom was set free after presenting the court with a self-accusatory letter Gridin wrote to his wife. Gridin says his cellmates forced him to write the letter.

The evidence against him was gathered with numerous breaches of Criminal Procedural Code. For example, his clothes were transported to the laboratory in the same bag as the victims', and when the fibers of his jeans were later found on a victim's dress it was considered evidence that he had attacked her.

Before Gridin was identified in a lineup, he was led in handcuffs through a hall where the victims were waiting. Later, one of the girls asked to identify the criminal that day testified that the investigating officer told her and others to point to Gridin, regardless of whether they recognized him.

The trial was held in an atmosphere of mass hysteria. Newspapers from the time describe a city covered with posters demanding "death to the serial killer." Police and prosecutors jubilantly informed the media that they had caught the feared "lift operator." They visited factories, where they urged people to write letters to the court demanding Gridin be sentenced to death. Distraught relatives of the murdered girls attacked Gridin's wife in the courtroom.

"It was a typical Russian trial," Gridin says, his eyes calm behind gold-rimmed glasses. "I wasn't really surprised when I was sentenced to death. They found me guilty even before the trial started."

It's precisely the "typicalness" of Gridin's case that makes the UN committee's decision so important, said Karina Moskalenko, director of the International Defense Center in Moscow, which handled Gridin's appeal to UN committee.

Gridin is serving his sentence in Krasny Island prison in a two-man cell with a metal bucket for a toilet.

"The same thing happens all over the country, all the time," she said. "If Gridin is set free, many will follow."

But Gridin's release seems unlikely. The government seems to be lacking both the will and the proper mechanisms to fulfill its international obligations in Gridin's case and remedy the injustice found by the committee.

Nikolai Gastello, spokesman for the Supreme Court ?€” the only institution with the legal power to overturn Gridin's conviction ?€” said he "did not believe" that Gridin would be released on the basis of the UN committee's recommendation. "I can't imagine that happening," he said, although he conceded he did not know all the details of the case.

Gastello suggested that even if Gridin's rights had been violated during the investigation and trial, that did not necessarily mean his case should be reviewed.

"Yes, there are a lot of procedural breaches in Russian courts, but they hardly ever influence the fairness of trials," Gastello said. "And especially in cases where such serious offenses are concerned."

A government official familiar with the case agreed.

"It's a question of the low legal culture of our judges," the official said. "But we can't afford to simply set people free because of it."

Gastello said he did not know whether or not the Supreme Court had received notification from the Foreign Ministry of the committee's decision.

The committee requested that the ministry inform it within 90 days as to what action had been taken to remedy the situation.

That deadline passed on Dec. 25, but committee officials say they have received no word from Russian officials.

"Russia should listen to this decision, but it doesn't have to," said Diederik Lohman, head of the Moscow office of Human Rights Watch. "The committee's only real power is the power of public knowledge and its capacity to create pressure on the decision-makers and make them review the case."

The pressure has been mounting, but not in the direction the committee or Gridin's defenders had hoped. The news of the decision has reached the Vologda press, which has carried articles warning against letting the "dangerous criminal" out of jail.

The news has also reached the Krasny Island prison, where Gridin is serving his sentence in a two-man cell with a metal bucket for a toilet. He gets one hour outdoors each day and a shower once every 10 days.

The guards don't hide their dislike for the difficult prisoner. To them, Gridin is guilty not only of rape and murder, but also of cowardice and a stubborn refusal to repent.

"Other prisoners sooner or later admit they committed their crimes and repent, but he doesn't," a guard said without much sympathy. "We can see he's very scared of everything, but he just keeps on talking about his rights."

Gridin's supporters acknowledge that it is unlikely Russia will acknowledge that he was unfairly treated, since doing so would mean admitting to much more than a procedural mistake in a single trial.

"It would be admitting a systematic error inherent to the country's justice system," Moskalenko said.

"Our courts treat procedure as something decorative, something that is nice if it can be achieved, but not really necessary. But a trial is built on procedure. If I can break procedure once, I can do it twice, or three times, and eventually make so many breaches that I am no longer able to establish the guilt of the suspect."

The UN committee and the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, are the only international institutions where Russian citizens can appeal after they have exhausted their appeals at home. The Gridin case is the first Russian case to be ruled on at either of these institutions, and Moskalenko said she expects an avalanche of rulings against Russia to follow.

"The logical reaction should be to reconsider and try to reform the judiciary," Moskalenko said. "But I'm afraid some people in our government will simply decide that they were too hasty in taking on these obligations ?€” and suggest that Russia withdraw from them."