#11 - JRL 8144 - JRL Home
Presidium of Russian Supreme Court upholds Budanov's sentence

MOSCOW. March 29 (Interfax) - The Presidium of the Russian Supreme Court has found no grounds to annul the ten year sentence handed down on Col. Yury Budanov, who was found guilty of abducting and killing a teenage Chechen girl, Elza Kungayeva.

His defense attorney, Pavel Astakhov, told Interfax Friday that he had received an official letter stating that the rejection of the appeal to revise the sentence by the Supreme Court's Military College was fair and
legally sound.

The documents submitted by the defense team do not warrant revision, the presidium members said.

In particular, the defense team's argument that Vladimir Bukreyev, a judge from the North Caucasus District Military Court, and expert Yury Loginov should not have taken part in the trial does not contain clarification of the nature of the relations between these people and Budanov's wife, they said.

Astakhov had argued that Loginov should not have been allowed to evaluate Budanov's mental condition because he had met with Budanov's wife and for a long time advised him as a medical doctor through her.

Furthermore, even before Bukreyev was appointed to chair the trial, Budanov's relatives had visited him on Loginov's advice.

The presidium of the Supreme Court found these circumstances insufficient to warrant annulling the sentence and opening a new court case.

Astakhov said that he intends to appeal to Supreme Court Chief Justice Vyacheslav Lebedev.

"If he rejects our appeal, we reserve the right to ask President Vladimir Putin for clemency," he said.

On October 6, 2003, the Supreme Court's Military College upheld the sentence handed down by the North Caucasus District Military Court in the Budanov case.