Today, on 30 May 2016, judge of the Sormovskiy District Court of Nizhny Novgorod Tatyana Sineva pronounced a verdict with regard to two former police officers of Police Department No.8 of the Sormovskiy District Sergey Baranov and Sergey Batmanov. They were declared guilty of crime under items «а», «b» part 3 Article 286 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation («Exceeding official powers using violence and special equipment»). Baranov was sentenced to 4 years of prison term, Batmanov – to 3.5 years. The court declared the punishment to be a conditional one.
As we have previously reported, on 9 September 2015 Anton Golovko from the Sormovsky District of Nizhny Novgorod applied to the Committee for Prevention of Torture for legal assistance. According to him, on 23 March 2012 he was tortured by the police officers of Police Department No.8 in order to make him confess of a theft from a car: police officers beat him up, put a gas mask on his face, choked him and hang him up. Golovko was forced to sign a full confession which by that time had already been written for him by one of the police officers, however, no criminal case was opened with regard to Anton.
Instead the investigative authorities opened a criminal case based on the fact of torture. It should be pointed out that the officers of the Directorate of Internal Security of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of the Interior of Russia for the Nizhny Novgorod region seized a number of material objects from the office of the suspected police officers, including gas masks, nunchucks, ropes.
On the same year of 2012 the criminal case was sent to the district court. The defendants and their defense team tried to topple the case by different means – once the judge had to return the case for the additional investigation. Then Anton Golovko applied to human rights defenders for legal assistance, and they started to represent his interests in court.
In the course of the court session State Prosecutor Aleksey Grinevetskiy considered the guilt of the defendants to be proven and asked the court to sentence Sergey Baranov to seven and Sergey Batmanov to four years of prison term in a standard regime penal colony.
Today judge of the Sormovskiy District Court of Nizhny Novgorod Tatyana Sineva found the former police officers guilty; however, she arrived at the conclusion that reformation of the convicts is possible without serving jail time.
«My client Anton Golovko is satisfied with the verdict according to which the convicts were found guilty and has no intention to appeal against it. Considering that Baranov spent over a year in a pre-trial detention facility, and Batmanov has three children, Anton thinks that conditional sentence will be a humane punishment for them. After the verdict has entered into its legal force we will file a suit on compensation for moral damage inflicted to Anton by the former police officers through their illegal actions», – lawyer of the Committee for Prevention of Torture Albert Kuznetsov, representing the interests of Anton Golovko in court, pointed out.