SOVIET JUDGES CENSURED

Greymouth Evening Star, 30 August 1934, Page 2

SOVIET JUDGES CENSURED

SENTENCES WITHOUT CAUSE. MOSCOW, July 19. Light is thrown on Soviet administration of justice in speeches delivered by IVI. Krilenko, Commissary lor Justice, IVI. Akuloff, the Public Piosecutor, and M. Vishinsky, his chief assistant, to a conference of Soviet judges. Although these high judicial officials condemn as harsh and unreasonable the extraordinary sentences passed at times by the judges, all would hate to be accused of “bourgeois” scruples. Indeed, M. Krilenko once heartily supported a proposal to dispense with the word “Justice" and to rename his department Commissariat for the Defence of Socialist Construction.” All three complain that the People’s Courts are too clumsy and stupid to execute high orders. The courts have, in particular they assert, “perverted and obscured the political intention of the two key decrees, “For the Defence of State and Social Property” and “To punish Low quality Output,” by using them to gratify “their own infatuation for repressions.” This phrase is M. Krilenko’s. M. Akuloff bluntly told the conference that what was wrong with them was their low human level. They were “slipshod” and “careless," and “neglected their most obvious duties.’ But their chief failings were “perversion and error.” 1 They continually, he declared, gave the maximum, sentence for the most trifling offences, while punishing the most heinous crimes from the Bolshevik . standpoint—for instance, letting a cow die—with a mere three or six months’ hard labour. Moreover, they constantly applied the above two decrees to cases which had no conceivable connection with either property or industry.

3 WRONGFUL CONVICTIONS. i Many persons, said M. Krilenko, J had been sentenced to death by the ■’ People’s Courts under these two de- ■ crees without any grounds whatsoever. More than one-third of the sentences inflicted in the second half of 1933 had to be quashed as “wrong- . ful convictions.” Many of the worst were never quashed at all. M. Krilenko read out a long list of punishments recently inflicted by People’s Courts. From these I quote a few specimens in which the sentence of ten years in a concentration camp was passed for crimes against “State and Social Property.” Woman factory worker, for stealing 21b of starch; Three waitresses in a canteen, for taking home two portions of dinner each, after , all meals for the day had been served; Peasant, for stealing 21b of grain; Peasant, for openly taking a handful of peas, when hungry after a long day’s threshing; Aged watchman on a collective farm, for eating three potatoes, after being left at his post 4S hours without any food; Collective farm milkmaid, for drinking one glass of milk; Boy tractor-driver on a collective farm, for accidentally doing a few shillings’ damage to ball-bearings when turning his machine; Witness, for witnessing a crime; Village school-teacher, because the school was burned down through a defective stove supplied by the authorities. To show “how it is often done,” M. Krilenko quoted the following advice by a president of the highest court of a self-governing region to the local judges and prosecutors, some of whom complained they did not know one word of the law: “You have eyes in your head. Just read the charge-sheets and be guide 1 by them. Our police never waste paper. Besides, there is the decree of August 7..1932 (Defence of State and Social Property). Read it, and give them ten years each.’’

She: Why are you always playinggolf? • He; It keeps me fit. She: Fit—for what? He: More golf.