President Medvedev announced at a recent press conference that Khodorkovsky and Lebedev would not pose a danger to anyone if they were to be released, but the independent Moscow City Court decided on its own, “Nah. Let ‘em sit there a while longer”. We have yet to hear the Supreme Court’s verdict…
… On 24 May, the Moscow City Court finally opened hearings in a cassation appeal by Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev against the sentence handed down by Judge Viktor Danilkin. The hearings had been postponed a week earlier, as the judges said they had not yet managed to study the additional appeals of the defendants and the defence. Yet, the delay was never actually explained – how were the judges able to get through 4,948 pages per day in preparing for the cassation appeal? That is exactly how many pages they would have needed to read per day in order to study all the documents in the second trial of Khodorkovsky and Lebedev in 21 working days – a total of 69,280 pages (plus notes on of court hearings and the cassation appeals themselves).