Today, on 16 April 2018, Nizhegorodsky Regional Court upheld the verdict of Andrey Dvortsov, who was previously declared guilty of committing a crime under Part 2 of Article 318 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (“applying violence against the representative of authority, threatening to life or health”) and sentenced to three years of prison term. Dvortsov himself accuses the police officers of the battery during apprehension.
(Photo: nn.ru)
As we have previously reported, on 26 September 2016, Manshuk Dvortsova from Druzhny settlement in Nizhny Novgorod region applied to human rights defenders with a complaint against using force against her husband, Andrey, by the policemen.
Later on, Mr Dvortsov clarified this day around 8 p.m. he was outside in the street with two friends. The man had drunk some alcohol before that. According to Andrey, when they were approached by three policemen who started to ask something, he ran away.
– One of the policemen caught me and performed a reap. I fell on the ground and was handcuffed from behind. After that they were beating me for a minute or so. At some point I fell unconscious, – Dvortsov remembers.
Andrey explained that he was working as a plumber. That day he was coming back from work wearing a uniform where he had a knife in one of the sleeves which is necessary for his work. As Andrey assumes, the reason for a sudden rage of the policemen was that when one of them was catching him by the sleeve and handcuffing him, he cut his hand.
Andrey spent the night at the police department. The next day he was given a statement with two fines for 500 rubles each for appearing drunk in a public place and disobedience of the legal order of the policeman.
On the same day, he recorded the received injuries in the local first-aid station: brain concussion, bruises on the face, left earflap, shoulders, anterior abdominal wall, left forearm, left scapular region, left cnemis, lumbar region, left knee-joint area, right hip, scratch marks on the right knee-joint area and parietal region.
On the next day Andrey’s condition got worse and he had to spend eight days in city hospital No. 39 of Nizhny Novgorod. After that he spent over three weeks having ambulant therapy.
During his treatment, Andrey learnt about initiating a criminal case against him for attacking a policeman. It took Ekaterina Abanina, investigator of the Investigative Committee for the Nizhny Novgorod region Investigative Department for Kstovo, four months to investigate this case.
Mr Dvortsov himself also applied to the Investigative Committee with a complaint against the police officers. The same investigator Abanina was assigned to perform the check of this complaint. By the present moment six refusals to initiate criminal proceedings have been issued, five of which were subsequently declared illegal and quashed. Now the human rights defenders are appealing against the last refusal.
On 7 December 2017, the Kstovo City Court declared Andrey Dvorstov guilty of committing the crime under Part 2 of Article 318 of the Criminal Code of Russia (“applying violence against the representative of authority, threatening to life or health”). The court imposed him a penalty in the form of three years of prison term in a standard security penal colony. The verdict was appealed against by the convict’s lawyer, Aleksey Matasov.
Today this complaint was examined in the Nizhegorodsky Regional Court, following this the court dismissed the complaint and upheld the verdict of the court of the first instance.