CASE OF TURYEV v. RUSSIA
Violation of Article 6 - Right to a fair trial (Article 6-2 - Presumption of innocence)
Alena Poláčková;Dmitry Dedov;Georgios A. Serghides;Helen Keller;Helena Jäderblom;Luis López Guerra;Pere Pastor Vilanova
5. The applicant was born in 1967 and until his conviction lived in Ivdel, a town in the Sverdlovsk Region. 6. In April 2000 the applicant was arrested on charges of murder and arson. 7. On 24 July 2000, as the investigation unfolded, the local official newspaper the North Star printed an interview with a deputy town prosecutor about a spike in murder rates. The prosecutor said: “In the first half of 2000 our town reported fourteen murders – a historic high, it seems. Twelve of them have already been solved, thanks to the industry of the police department and the investigators from the prosecutor’s office.... The fingerprint identification of ex-convict [N.B.] (whose body was found in [a river]) has allowed to discover his enemies and to prove that he was beaten by three inhabitants of Ivdel seeking [...] to settle scores for his murder of [another man] for which [he] had served almost nine years. It has been established that [N.B.’s] two murderers – [the applicant’s codefendant] and S. Turyev, both ex-convicts – were complicit in the earlyMarch murder of [L.R.] who had dared to report them to the police for past wrongs. [Her] body was dumped in a wood near the airport and was found only in May. As those crimes were not solved in time, [the applicant’s codefendant] rampaged on and on 20 April killed [another woman] who had witnessed the night-time arson at Vizhayskaya Street that had killed five. By the way, both [L.R.] and [the other woman] (whose body was found in a well next to the sports centre) had been garrotted with a wire. All three persons arrested in this multicount case will undergo forensic psychiatric observation because of the gravity of the crimes committed, which carry up to twenty years or life in prison. But even after these downright senseless murders, the crime wave in the town continued.” 8. When the case came to trial before the Sverdlovsk Regional Court, the applicant moved to disqualify the prosecutor for the prejudice apparent in that interview. On 4 October 2002 the court refused the motion because the prosecutor had only cited facts from the investigative file, had affirmed the applicant’s complicity but not his guilt, and was not personally interested in the outcome of the trial. 9. On 22 January 2003 the court sentenced the applicant to twenty years’ imprisonment for arson and the murders of N.B. and L.R. On 23 October 2003 the Supreme Court upheld the sentence, leaving unanswered the applicant’s complaint about the press interview. 10. In reply to a post-conviction complaint brought by the applicant, in December 2004 the Sverdovsk Regional Prosecutor’s Office found that the interview had breached the agency’s ethics policy as it had preceded the trial without, however, tangibly redressing the applicant.