Representing the Victims

Here’s an interesting facet of the Russian criminal justice system I wasn’t aware of, gleaned from a recent New Yorker article on the murder of journalist Anna Politkovskaya (abstract only, unfortunately):

It is an emotionally powerful feature of Russian criminal law that the “side of the victims”—_stonora poterpevshykh_—is represented on an equal footing with the prosecution and the defense. The counsel for the victims is allowed to call and question witnesses, submit protests to the court, make closing remarks. It’s an ambiguous institution: where the prosecution wants a conviction, and the defense wants an acquittal, the victims want justice—or, as the victims and their lawyers in this case kept saying, “the truth.”