The case of doctors ended in a colony – Newspaper Kommersant No. 164 (7365) of 09/07/2022

Moscow Regional Court sentenced to nine and a half and nine years in prison and. about. head physician of the Kaliningrad maternity hospital Elena Belaya and neonatologist Elina Sushkevich. A year ago, a jury in Kaliningrad acquitted the doctors, but this decision was overturned, after which a jury in Moscow found them guilty of killing a premature baby. Doctors deny their guilt, on their side and part of the representatives of the professional community. The defense intends to appeal the verdict, while the prosecution insists on the indisputability of the evidence.

On the night of August 24, the jurors, after seventeen meetings, announced the verdict – they recognized and. about. head physician of maternity hospital No. 4 of Kaliningrad Elena Belaya and neonatologist Elina Sushkevich guilty of killing a premature baby on November 6, 2018. After that, the prosecutor asked for 13 years in prison for the accused. And on Tuesday, the court sentenced Elina Sushkevich and Elena Belaya to nine and nine and a half years in prison. In addition, they were banned from practicing medicine for three years after their release.

According to the investigators, Ms. Belaya was afraid of the worsening of the statistics of the maternity hospital and therefore instructed Ms. Sushkevich to administer a lethal dose of magnesium sulfate to the prematurely born child.

After that, “deliberately false information that there was a fact of fetal death” was entered in the history of childbirth. The defense side insisted that the investigation did not provide evidence of the truth of this version, and magnesium entered the child’s body through the placenta, since the mother took it during pregnancy.

On December 10, 2020, the first jury of the Kaliningrad Regional Court found the doctors innocent. However, representatives of the injured party and the Prosecutor General’s Office filed an appeal, stating that the jury put pressure the public and the media.

In May 2021, the First Court of Appeal of General Jurisdiction in Moscow canceled the acquittal. Later, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation, at the request of Deputy Prosecutor General Igor Tkachev, transferred the retrial of the criminal case from Kaliningrad to the Moscow Regional Court. On November 5, at the very first meeting, Elina Sushkevich and Elena Belaya were taken into custody, explaining the decision, among other things, by the fact that they do not have registration in the Moscow region. Since then they are in pre-trial detention center No. 6 in Pechatniki.

On the eve of the verdict, Kommersant said that, according to the defense, the trial in Moscow was of an “accusatory nature.”

Elina Sushkevich’s lawyer, Kamil Babasov, told Kommersant that the judge had rejected all of the defense’s motions, including a request that the jury hear specialists from neonatologists and a toxicologist.

“The court said that everything is clear to everyone. But we still have a lot of questions for the experts, primarily for calculations (the concentration of magnesium sulfate in the blood of an infant.— “b”). We believe that the expert opinions in the case file are unreliable,” the lawyer said.

Commenting on the verdict, Andrei Zolotukhin, another lawyer for Ms. Sushkevich, lamented that the prosecution was “virtually” represented by a judge, while the public prosecutor “zealously and actively did not participate in the process.” According to the defenders, the prosecution did not provide the court with new evidence, with the exception of a letter from the Deputy Minister of Health of the Kaliningrad Region, Elena Semenova. In it, Ms. Semyonova “makes her judgments” that the worsening infant mortality rates could affect the prospects for the appointment of Elena Belaya to the post of chief physician in the future. “My colleagues and I do not agree with the verdict. Both Sushkevich and Bela and the medical community do not agree. We will definitely appeal against it,” Andrey Zolotukhin said.

The lawyer of the injured party, Larisa Guseva, told Kommersant that she was satisfied with the verdict. She said she received “words of thanks” from the mother of the deceased infant and her family.

“We are glad that this hell is over,” Ms. Guseva said. At the same time, she expressed her readiness to continue defending the rights of her principals in the appellate instance.

Elina Sushkevich and Elena Belaya never pleaded guilty. “I think the verdict of the jury is unfair. There was no murder. The jury was put under enormous pressure. The accusing party has been strengthened,” Mrs. Belaya said her last word in the courtroom. Ms. Sushkevich was more emotional: “I believe that the court has enough information to make an acquittal. I never said or claimed that the child had no chance of life. There were, but only with proper resuscitation. I did not kill the child, and I did not inject him with magnesia. I’m not ashamed to look people in the eye. I’m not ashamed to look into my mother’s eyes. She knows she raised a doctor, not a murderer.”

Representatives of the professional community continue to insist on the innocence of doctors.

“This unfair court decision suggests that today the main direction in solving problems that have arisen in healthcare is pressure on doctors. They should be guilty of everything,” says Semyon Galperin, president of the Doctors’ Defense League. In his opinion, the process was deliberately moved from Kaliningrad to Moscow in order to find “a different composition of judges and jurors who would agree with the position of the prosecution.” Mr. Halperin insists that “not a single reference book” contains the concept of “lethal dose of magnesium sulfate”, so the verdict was made on the basis of “completely meaningless conclusions” by forensic experts. “I hope that in the future the appeal will lead to a fair decision,” concluded Mr. Halperin.

Note that the process of Elena Belaya and Elina Sushkevich has become one of the most high-profile and resonant medical cases. The Russian Society of Neonatologists, the National Medical Chamber headed by Leonid Roshal, and a number of chief freelance specialists from the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation stood up for the doctors, primarily for Ms. Sushkevich. Initiative doctors launched the #YaElinaSushkevich campaign on social networks, and a petition in defense of the neonatologist gained more than 270,000 signatures. At the same time, not everyone in the professional community is confident in the innocence of doctors. Thus, Igor Artyukhov, editor-in-chief of the Medical Russia portal on the relationship of doctors with patients, the media and law enforcement agencies, analyzed the conclusions of forensic experts, the arguments of the defense and the prosecution and found “a number of contradictions.” He noted the audio recording of a fragment of a conversation between Elena Belaya and her subordinates, on the morning of November 6, 2018, made by Tatyana Sokolova, head of the maternity ward of maternity hospital No. 4. On the recording, Mrs. Belaya reprimands doctors for providing resuscitation care to a child in serious condition: “… You set everyone up, including the chief freelance obstetrician-gynecologist. Therefore, we sit down and rewrite history and do antenatal (antenatal death – the death of the fetus during pregnancy.— “b”)”. Mr. Artyukhov emphasizes that this and other witness statements, a commission examination, as well as the seized documentation of the woman in labor, “falsified at the direction of Belaya,” confirm the version of the investigation.

It should be noted that before the entry into force of the verdict, Elena Belaya and Elina Sushkevich will be in jail. After that, if the court rejects the appeal, they will be able to serve their sentence at the place of registration, in the Kaliningrad region.

Natalya Kostarnova