MOSCOW (AP) — The tax-evasion conviction of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky more than three years after his death in a Russian prison was the first under a 2011 Russian law allowing posthumous trials, but not the first time the dead have been put on trial.
The Russian law allows such trials under the principle that a dead defendant’s relatives should have the opportunity to seek to clear the departed’s name — an echo of the Soviet practice of “rehabilitating” those executed for political crimes or who died in labor camps. Continue reading “The dead aren’t always excused from trial”