Release Date
According to his official site, Khodorkovsky would have been eligible for early release, but an alleged conspiracy involving jail guards and a cell mate resulted in a statement that Mikhail had violated one of the prison rules. The statement was sufficient to make Khodorkovsky lose his rights, once the statement was logged in his file.
It was predicted that he might be released by the middle of 2011, although Khodorkovsky has been found guilty (27 December 2010) of fresh charges of embezzlement and money laundering, which could lead to a new sentence of up to 22 years. He alleged that both cases were instigated by Igor Sechin. "The second as well as the first case were organized by Igor Sechin," the tycoon claimed in an interview with The Sunday Times from a remand prison in the Siberian city of Chita, 4,000 miles (6,400 km) east of Moscow.
On 22 August 2008, he was denied parole by Judge Igor Faliliyev, at the Ingodinsky regional court in Chita, Siberia. The basis for this was in part because Khodorkovsky "refused to attend jail sewing classes".
In the second trial, the prosecutors have asked the judge for a 14-year sentence, which is just one year less than the maximum. The judge Danilkin handed down the verdict on 30 December 2010 where he upheld the prosecutors' claims. Taking into account the time already served, Khodorkovsky will be released in 2017. U.S. President Barack Obama, the U.S. State Department, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and British Foreign Minister William Hague condemned or expressed concern over Khodorkovsky's extended sentence. The White House said it brought Russia's legal system into question.
On 15 February Vyacheslav Lebedev, chairman of Russia's Supreme Court, suggested reviving an old Soviet practice under which a maximum sentence for a person charged with different crimes should not exceed the sentence attached to the most serious charge: in Khodorkovsky's case, nine years. Since he has been in jail since October 2003, this would mean releasing him in October 2012 – a few months after the next presidential election.
On 5 March 2012, the day after Prime Minister Putin won his third term as President of Russia, President Medvedev ordered a review of Khodorkovsky’s sentence.
Read more about this topic: Mikhail Khodorkovsky
Famous quotes containing the words release and/or date:
“The shallow consider liberty a release from all law, from every constraint. The wise man sees in it, on the contrary, the potent Law of Laws.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“We, when we sow the seeds of doubt deeper than the most up-to- date and modish free-thought has ever dreamed of doing, we well know what we are about. Only out of radical skepsis, out of moral chaos, can the Absolute spring, the anointed Terror of which the time has need.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)