Word: prisoners
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...Kremlin may have hoped that by jailing Mikhail Khodorkovsky on tax evasion charges, they would eliminate any political challenge represented by the oil tycoon. Instead, the prison experience may be honing Khodorkovsky's credentials as a future challenger to President Putin - and, say his lawyer and a former KGB man who worked for his oil company, prompting the authorities to resort to some old Soviet tricks to stop...
...like he'd been thrust back into the Soviet gulag: Sentenced to eight years in a Siberian labor camp at Krasnokamensk, Khodorkovsky has been denied access to any intellectual activity. Access to books has been denied, and television is available only in the facility's recreation room, where other prisoners prefer watching soap operas. Khodorkovsky spends every day from 6 a.m. till 10 p.m. doing senseless manual labor and taking courses on glove-stitching. He is under constant monitoring by a team sent from Moscow of officials from the prisons department and the FSB (the security service that succeeded...
...Khodorkovsky's prison experience turned bloody last Friday at 3 a.m., when the tycoon's nose was slashed with a cobbler's knife by a fellow prisoner, later identified as Kuchma. "I wanted to cut his eye out," Kuchma said, when interrogated by the camp administration. "But my hand slipped." Kuchma said he assaulted Khodorkovsky because he was afraid of an imminent transfer to a different barrack, where he would have been in trouble with other prisoners - he hoped the assault would result in his being placed in solitary confinement until the transfer situation dissipates. After the assault...
...expert in Soviet-era prison tactics sees a familiar pattern in the assault on Khodorkovsky. Alexei Kondaurov, a retired KGB major-general, a former official of Khodorkovsky's oil company, Yukos, and current member of the Russian legislature, recalls how other convicts, often mentally unstable, were recruited as agents and placed around a target prisoner. They don't need orders to assault a prisoner singled out by the administration for harsh treatment, Kondaurov says. "They just do it to seek lenience and rewards...
...Illinois certainly has tried to do just that. Shortly after Ryan granted clemency to some and commuted all other death sentences to life in prison, the state launched a major study and overhaul of the system. At the time, about thirteen inmates on Death Row had been found innocent and freed, one more than the number who had been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in 1977. New reforms adopted included an overhaul in police lineups to guard against false identifications, the videotaping of most murder confessions, some state Supreme Court oversight of capital cases to make sure they...