Supreme Court upholds verdict for skinheads leaders

MOSCOW, May 14 (Itar-Tass) - The Russian Supreme Court on Friday
upheld the third verdict for Artur Ryno and Pavel Skachevsky, the leaders
of the a group of skinheads who had committed numerous hate murders. The
court thereby turned down their lawyers' appeal.
At the Friday hearing, the lawyers asked to take out the classifying
signs from the verdict over murder, which implied that it had been
committed with particular brutality and in collusion.
They also argued that during the trial, the prosecutors had put
pressure on the jury, bringing to them the information on the defendants
which must not be divulged.
The prosecutor called for leaving the verdict unchanged.
On February 24, the Moscow City Court found Ryno and Skachevsky guilty
of another count of murder, but did not add a new jail term to the 10-year
sentence meted out earlier. Under the effective legislation, Ryno and
Skachevsky committed crimes when they were underage, so the maximum
penalty cannot exceed that term.
The verdict was passed on the strength of the jury's opinion, who said
the defendants were guilty and did not deserve clemency.
It is the third verdict for the skinhead leaders. At the first trial
they were sentenced to ten years in jail. The second verdict was handed
down by judge Eduard Chuvashov in April 2010, who later was killed in a
stairwell of his apartment house. He found Ryno and Skachevsky guilty of
new counts of crime.
The investigators said on April 4, 2007, they stabbed to death a
37-year-old man in Bolshaya Cherkozovskaya Street. The attack was
motivated by racial hatred.
The members of the gang, called "the Ryno-Skachevsky gang" (by the
names of its leaders) were accused of murders and attempted murders in
Moscow. Police said they killed 20 people and wounded another 12 in the
period from August 2006 through October 2007.
"Influenced by the ideas of the superiority of ethnic Russians and the
deficiency of the non-Slavs, disseminated by illegal youth organization by
various methods, the defendants united into an organized group to commit
murders of natives of former Soviet republic of Asian and Caucasus
descent," prosecutors said earlier.
The other members of the group were given longer prison terms.