The Murder of Paul Klebnikov, and a Tormented Juror

Ellen Barry of The New York Times weighs in today with an interesting five-year anniversary story on the assassination of Forbes correspondent Paul Klebnikov, the New York native who was shot in the back as he walked to the Metro across the street from his office. The angle is an interview with Alexei Rybin, a juror in the 2006 trial that acquitted three suspects. Rybin is tormented because he believes that guilty men went free.

The trial itself seemed destined not to produce an objectively reached verdict. In one passage, Barry describes jurors watching from a window "as a witness fled the courthouse pursued by five men in masks, then was tackled, handcuffed and put in the back of a van."

The piece describes the multiple forces that confound justice. Yes, Russia is still unaccustomed to the jury system, and politics infuses and interferes with jurisprudence. In addition, there is much speculation that the jury was tampered with -- for instance, neighbors of the jurors whispered in their ears that the men were innocent, and they apparently listened.

With President Barack Obama in Moscow last week, the Russians agreed to a joint investigation with U.S. detectives in the case. Yet, a little over a week earlier, Petros Garibyan, the highly skilled investigator of the murders of both Klebnikov and journalist Anna Politkovskaya, wrote a letter telling Klebnikov's lawyers that their probe was over. At the New Yorker, Keith Gessen writes about the problems with both the Klebnikov and Politkovskaya trials.

As we've discussed here previously, as well as in Putin's Labyrinth, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has at minimum enabled the system of unpunished murder, and President Dmitry Medvedev isn't willing to challenge him on it.