A Russian appeals court yesterday unexpectedly ordered the release of one member of anti-Kremlin punk feminist band Pussy Riot but upheld the two-year prison camp sentences against her two bandmates.
In a major surprise, Yekaterina Samutsevich, 30, was released in the courtroom after her lawyer successfully argued she was not fully involved in the group’s cathedral performance of a song opposing President Vladimir Putin.
Samutsevich, who the court gave a two-year suspended prison camp sentence, walked out into the crush of waiting reporters and hugged her friends and her father, looking dazed and calling the decision completely unexpected.
“Of course, I am glad but I am upset because of the girls, that their sentences have not been changed,” she said, before being quickly ushered by her friends into a waiting car.
Samutsevich, Maria Alyokhina, 24, and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, were contesting their conviction for hooliganism motivated by religious hatred over performing the song in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in February. The judge at the Moscow city court Larisa Polyakova gave Samutsevich the suspended term but upheld the two-year prison camp sentences of Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova.
The decision was met by cheers in the courtroom and the girls hugged in their glass cage as they said farewell.
Samutsevich at the first appeals hearing on October 1 announced she was changing her lawyer and the new lawyer argued she had been apprehended before taking part in the performance.
Irina Khrunova said a security guard had grabbed her client and her electric guitar as soon as the performance began. “The Punk Prayer took place without Samutsevich.
She had already been taken out of the church,” Khrunova said.
The decision sparked speculation as to what led the judge to free Samutsevich but not the other defendants, who are both mothers of young children. “We are glad that (Samutsevich) was freed,” said Tolokonnikova’s lawyer Mark Feigin, but added that the decision may make things harder for the two jailed convicts.