Two human rights campaigners said Thursday that despite personal intervention by President Dmitri A. Medvedev that officials responsible for the death of a lawyer last year in pretrial detention were facing no substantial punishment. In November, Medvedev ordered an inquiry into the treatment of the lawyer, Sergei L. Magnitsky, 37, who died in a prison hospital after carefully documenting his requests for medical care. Amid public outrage over the case, Medvedev dismissed around 20 prison officials. Prosecutors opened an inquiry into negligence and failure to provide medical care, charges that carry sentences of up to five and three years in prison, respectively. But five months have passed, and no one has yet been charged with a crime. Lyudmila M. Alexeyeva, who sits on Medvedev's human rights council, said she would recommend that the group take control of the case, which she said 'is not moving.' 'We have a vertical of power,' said Alexeyeva, who is chairwoman of the Moscow Helsinki Group, a nongovernmental rights organization. 'Our president has constitutional powers no emperor ever had. But did that help punish those who brought Magnitsky to his death? Nothing of the kind. All those people are still working in their positions.' She added, 'The president is indignant, but this signal does not make its way to the bottom.' A spokesman for the investigative committee of the Russian prosecutor general's office was not available for comment. An Interior Ministry spokesman last year said Magnitsky never told investigators about his health problems, while a top prison official acknowledged 'clear violations on our side.' Magnitsky had been working as outside counsel for the Hermitage Fund, whose owner, William F. Browder, had accused Russian officials of using his companies to embezzle money. Russian officials charged Hermitage with tax evasion and arrested Magnitsky. During the year Magnitsky spent in pretrial detention, his defenders say, investigators pressed him to testify against Hermitage. Valery V. Borshchev, who heads a watchdog group that monitors prison conditions, said his organization received no response to a scathing report it submitted to prosecutors in December. He said that he believed Magnitsky was intentionally denied medical care on the orders of the lead investigator in the tax-evasion case, who Borshchev said was guilty not of negligence but of a far graver crime, 'intentionally creating the conditions that led to death.' In response to the outcry, Medvedev also rewrote the criminal code so that suspects of tax crimes could not be jailed. 'This is not just a matter of the life and death of Sergei Magnitsky; it is a question of our entire system,' said Borshchev, who heads the Public Oversight Commission. Last year 4,600 inmates died in Russian prison colonies, and 540 in pretrial detention centers, he said. 