
The journalist of the «Daily journal» Zoya Svetova in her article «Results of the year. The president Dmitry Medvedev’s counter-proposal» discusses about a condition of the judicial system of Russia nowadays and remembers the most celebrated trials of 2008, among them – trial by default of the former «Yukos» vice-president Leonid Nevzlin, sentenced to life imprisonment, in spite of absence of witnesses and proofs of guilt. The author reminds that before with analogous charges there was convicted for life imprisonment, as an «accomplice of crime actions» Alexey Pichugin, serving his sentence in the colony «Black dolphin». At Leonid Nevzlin’s trial two false witnesses confessed that they had slandered the «Yukos» employees under the pressure of the General Prosecutor’s Office’s investigators, but it didn’t have an influence upon the sentence.