According to the Global Post and other sources, Georgia has finally adopted jury trials, at least for cases of aggravated murder – and for now, only in Tbilisi. This is reportedly part of a larger program to introduce jury trials more broadly, weaken the role of judges in Georgian trials, where they are more like advocates instead of impartial arbiters of cases, and reform the Georgian judicial system overall. And it’s badly in need or fundamental change, something even Georgia’s friends in the US often admit.
The systemically flawed Georgian judiciary is seen as an impediment to the country’s entry into NATO, and this may have been what the NATO Secretary General was alluding to (at least in part) on October 1 when he affirmed support for Georgia’s entry into the alliance once it “fulfills the necessary criteria.”
There have been a number of legal cases in Georgia as of late that have raised concerns regarding the independence of the judiciary and due process. One such case involved the conviction of Maia Topuria in 2007 for alleged involvement in a planned coup d’etat. No visitors or press were allowed to cover the trial, and as Ken Silverstein wrote in his blog for Harper’s Magazine:
“When they were originally arrested, the defendants were accused of participating in a May 24, 2006 meeting where they were said to have plotted the government’s overthrow. When one of the defendants proved that he was out of the country on that day, the government changed the date of the alleged plot to May 4. When another defendant proved he was at a cardiac clinic on that day, the government suggested he sneaked out to attend the coup meeting, though four doctors at the clinic have said it that would have been impossible for him to have done so unnoticed.
The government has offered as evidence a handwritten statement implicating the defendants from a witness who claimed he provided it in September of 2006 after he heard of the plot. But when questioned by a defense attorney in court, the witness could not even define numerous words from his original statement. (He defined “dispute” as “a TV debate,” “imitation” as an “attempt,” and said that he no longer knew what “spontaneous” meant but he did when he wrote his original statement.)”
So long-overdue change may be on the way. The very informative Global Post article (by Roshan Nebhrajani) also mentions that Georgia is receiving assistance in its transition to jury trials from—among others—the EU Rule of Law Mission to Georgia, and the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Rule of Law Initiative. The ABA has done impressive work in Russia and Azerbaijan, although in the case of the latter nation, they have not really gotten much traction, due to the intransigence of the Azerbaijani judiciary.
I’ve been told by legal sources in Azerbaijan (as late as 2006) that prospective judges had to pay a $20,000 “fee” to get a seat on the bench, and that there is an understood payoff (bribe) structure for cases where defendants’ families can afford to get sentences reduced. The going rate in 2006 was (according to one source) $1000 for every year taken off a sentence. Your uncle Etibar got an eight-year sentence for smuggling or assault with a deadly weapon? Fine. Get together with the prosecutor and your defense attorney in the judge’s chambers and give the judge, let’s say, $4000 that you’ve managed to scrape together. That’s four years off the sentence! The judge and the two attorneys split the proceeds among the three of them, with the judge getting most of the money.
You’re a hot lawyer and want to be a defense attorney for serious crimes? You’ve got to belong to the “Collegium,” which is a bit like a bar association, but far more powerful. The problem is that the Collegium tends not to like lawyers who rock the boat, i.e. actually defend their clients with vigor. And you have to pass a written and oral exam to get into the Collegium. One prominent defense attorney told me that he surprisingly failed several oral exams, even those that were give by his former law school students. It was just a coincidence that he likes to represent well-known opposition figures.
Getting back to the ABA, they managed (along with the State Department and no doubt other organizations) to convince Russia to introduce jury trials in very limited venues as far back as 1993, when bench trials were seeing a nearly 100% conviction rate. When juries hear cases in Russia, the conviction rate is 85%. Some bench-only courts still have a perfect 100% conviction rate, and some judges who acquit in other courts soon find themselves enmeshed in efforts by the state to remove them from the bench, according to this article by long-time Washington Post Moscow correspondent Peter Finn.
In May of last year, I asked a young Georgian law school graduate if he thought that jury trials would make a difference. His answer surprised me: “It will not really make a difference here,” he said. “Jury members in Georgia will simply look at the judge for hints in his tone of voice or his facial gestures. They will want guidance from an authority figure. In a jury trial, no one would want to go against the wishes of the judge.”
Let’s hope he’s wrong.
