A case that split society: the jury found Belaya and Sushkevich guilty

The jury found the Kaliningrad doctors Belaya and Sushkevich guilty of murdering a newborn boy in the maternity hospital. This is the second jury verdict in a high-profile case.

According to the first decision, issued back in 2020, both women were found not guilty. On August 30, 2022, the defendants will receive their final verdict.

Well, the justification of Belaya and Sushkevich is now hardly possible. Although, most likely, the upcoming verdict, no matter how much they receive, will be appealed by the defense.

According to the main article of the charge 105 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation “Murder of a minor committed by a group of persons by prior conspiracy”, women face up to twenty years in prison. The Criminal Code provides for up to life imprisonment, but in Russia this type of punishment is not applied to the fairer sex.

The very investigation into the circumstances of the death of Odiljon Amirov, who was born at the 24th week of pregnancy and lived only a few hours, has been going on for more than four years.

During this time, a criminal case was opened against the doctors who took delivery, in 2020 they were acquitted, in 2021 the court of appeal overturned the original verdict. It was appealed by the mother of the deceased baby, after which the Supreme Court decided to change the jurisdiction and sent the case to the Moscow Regional Court.

According to the RF IC, in 2020 the jury’s verdict was adopted under the influence of emotional factors, and not as a result of studying the available evidence in the case.

At first, both suspects were under house arrest, then, assuming that they could influence the investigation, since prosecution witnesses began to receive threatening SMS, they were sent to a pre-trial detention center – moreover, from Kaliningrad to Moscow Pechatniki.

Recall that, according to investigators, in November 2018, in the city maternity hospital No. 4, they did not want to resuscitate a severely premature baby who weighed only 700 grams (a live birth with a weight of 500 grams or more must be saved), acting. head physician Elena Belaya allegedly instructed her subordinate resuscitator Elina Sushkevich to inject the boy with a lethal dose of magnesium sulfate through an umbilical catheter.

According to the case file, the motive for the crime was extremely cynical: in order not to worsen the statistics of infant mortality in the region and not to get scolded, they decided to present the baby as stillborn, that is, who died before his first breath.

False data that the child died in the womb were retroactively included in the medical records. Both doctors were sure the boy would not survive anyway. However, a forensic examination showed that he was quite viable.

“There are the concepts of “liveborn” and “stillborn”. He was a live-born, and the doctors had to save him in any case, ”said Larisa Guseva, the family’s defender, at the trial.

Even during the first trial, the head of the forensic team confirmed that the baby “was alive and was not going to die for the next few hours, or maybe days, or maybe not at all.”

This criminal case split the Russian society. The attention of not only the media and doctors, but also legislators was riveted to him.

In social networks, they organized the action “#YaElinaSushkevich”, and also launched a petition in defense of the neonatologist, which was signed by more than 270 thousand people.

In support of colleagues, including the Russian Society of Neonatologists, the National Medical Chamber, headed by Leonid Roshal.

“This is a landmark event for the entire Russian medical community, which often works on the verge of the possible, fulfilling its duties in the fight for people’s lives,” Timur Marshani, the defendant’s lawyer, put pressure on sympathy, by the way, he was later detained in the case of major fraud.

It is clear that the boy’s mother, a very simple woman, would never have been able to achieve such increased attention to her son’s death, but the interest in this case at the very top had not only legal, but also ethical underpinnings.

And it was not just a matter of medical error or criminal negligence, on which the medical community tried to insist, but a matter of intent.

Even the Russian Orthodox Church dealt with it. Moreover, the position of the religious community was unambiguously negative.

“The attitude of the medical community towards the most defenseless of patients – a premature baby – is eerie and symptomatic,” comments Sofya Drobyazko, lawyer at the Patriarchal Commission for Family Affairs, Protection of Motherhood and Childhood. – The severity of the disputes unequivocally speaks, firstly, of the need to revise existing approaches to the formation of statistics, the doctor should not think about mortality rates and weigh what is easier for him in a particular case: to try to save or not to try.

Secondly, this case exposes the scope and depth of the abortive thinking of our society, when the death of a child in the womb is easier and more preferable. It is worth noting that an open consideration and public discussion of this high-profile case, despite its pain, can benefit society.”

“It doesn’t seem to me that now society has revised its views, rather, it has finally taken two directly opposite positions, which, in fact, do not depend much on what is actually established in the case,” Sofya Drobyazko continues. – This, unfortunately, shows the level of distrust of doctors and patients to each other. In such conditions, justice faces a difficult task.”

It is possible that this criminal case will go down in the history of medicine and jurisprudence, it will become a precedent, especially since in the very near future Russian legislation, as they say, is waiting for tougher penalties for medical errors, including those related to the death of children during childbirth.

As one of the consequences of what happened, in a number of Russian regions the term “infant mortality” was excluded from the basic statistical indicators of demographics, so that doctors would not chase results, preferring not to save severely premature babies.