Russia murder investigations trapped in legal mire

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Years of official pressure on Russia's judges and prosecutors have created a justice system that is frequently incapable of solving prominent murder cases.

The problem was underlined on Thursday when a court acquitted three men accused of assisting in the murder of Kremlin critic Anna Politkovskaya. Neither the gunman nor the person who ordered the killing has been found.

The shooting was one of a series of high-profile killings that investigators have struggled to solve, including the murders of U.S. investigative reporter Paul Klebnikov and Ruslan Yamadayev, a Chechen opposition leader.

Critics and legal experts say the Kremlin has not directly blocked the investigations, but has undermined the legal system to such an extent that prosecutions repeatedly fail.

"It is very rare to see progress in these high-profile cases ... partly due to the poor quality of the judicial system, but also because the executive bends the judiciary, completely undermining it," said Maria Lipman, an analyst with the Carnegie Center thinktank in Moscow.

By securing control over the courts, the Kremlin has created a generation of prosecutors and investigators prone to manipulation and dependant on pliant judges to secure convictions, she said.

"It doesn't want an efficient, fair court system. It has a higher priority: that courts are under its control," she said.

A deeper problem is lax work practices by prosecutors and investigators used to serving a system where judges, who usually sit without a jury, find over 99 percent of defendants guilty.

Faced with an open-minded jury, these failings are quickly exposed, said Mara Polyakova, a former judge who campaigns for legal reform in Russia.

"Even when they have good evidence, prosecutors don't know how to present it so it is understandable and convincing," she said. "They are not careful and there is no attention to detail."

The Prosecutor-General's office said on Thursday it was still preparing its response to a written request from Reuters asking about its performance on high-profile murder cases.

"LACK OF EFFORT"

President Dmitry Medvedev has made legal reform, including the modernization of the Soviet-era prosecution system, a priority.

Prosecutors had some success last year when they secured the conviction a 37-year-old financier for ordering the murder of the deputy head of the Central Bank, Andrei Kozlov.

But overall, poor investigation has become systemic in the Russian system, said Bill Bowring, a professor of human rights law at London University's Birkbeck College who worked on several cases brought by ethnic Chechens to the European Court of Human Rights.

"In every single one of those cases they found a total lack of effort to investigate," he said. "At the moment it is getting worse."

Failures have been particularly acute when journalists are involved, said Nina Ognianova, a researcher with the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists.

Sixteen journalists have been killed since 2000 in cases connected with their work and 15 of those cases remain unsolved because of a lack of political will, poor investigations, and ill-equipped prosecutors, she said.

Politkovskaya's supporters say the political overtones of her case make a conviction of the mastermind of the assassination far less likely.

"It depends on the real desire to solve the crime. We do not see this desire in the Politkovskaya case," said Karina Moskalenko, who represents the reporter's family.

The Politkovskaya murder investigation was undermined by the fact that investigators were unsure what the Kremlin wanted, said Sergei Sokolov, a senior editor at Novaya Gazeta, the newspaper where Politkovskaya worked.

The Kremlin initially hinted it believed wealthy Russians living abroad were to blame, but this may have changed since Medvedev took office last year, said Sokolov.

"While the investigators are formally free, they are hostage to political disagreements and political games among the Russian authorities," he said.