Word: kaminskaya
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...years Dina Kaminskaya was a familiar and respected figure in Moscow's crowded old courthouses and in the vast corridors of the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union's Russian Republic. The diminutive (5 ft.) defense lawyer packed more energy and determination into preparing her cases than many an unwary prosecutor, complacent in the knowledge that in the U.S.S.R. the law is stacked against the defense. That was the prosecutors' mistake. Kaminskaya obtained acquittals in more than 100 criminal cases...
...legend among prisoners in the Gulag, Kaminskaya was said to have the eloquence to move the most stonyhearted judge to render a merciful decision. Her scrupulous and exhaustive presentations earned praise even from Communist Party-controlled jurists at the top of her profession. In an official 1959 book entitled The Moscow Bar, she was acclaimed as "a well-known forensic orator capable of combining deep-felt emotionalism that stirs in her hearers solicitude for the fate of the defendant with the faculty of sober, logical analysis...
...that changed in 1967, as Kaminskaya recounts in an engrossing new book, Final Judgment (Simon & Schuster; $18.95). In that year she made the fateful decision to represent the Soviet Union's most outspoken dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky, who had been charged with organizing a demonstration in Moscow's Pushkin Square. Kaminskaya boldly pleaded for acquittal, partly on the ground that Bukovsky had the right to demonstrate under the Soviet constitution. The legal community was shocked that she had invoked the constitution-a tactic that is taboo in political cases. In practice, the basic civil rights guaranteed by the constitution...
...Kaminskaya continued to represent dissidents during the next decade, thus falling deeper into official disfavor. Neither her logic nor her famed oratory proved sufficient to win an acquittal in a single political case. After being harassed by the Soviet secret police, Kaminskaya and her husband Konstantin Simis, also a lawyer, were summarily ordered to leave the U.S.S.R...
...couple settled in Arlington, Va., where Kaminskaya wrote Final Judgment. It is the first major insider's account of the Soviet criminal-justice system. Most revealing-and surprising-are her descriptions of how justice often prevails in criminal cases, in spite of a judiciary that is lacking in independence...