The guilty verdict handed down by the Moscow Regional Court in the case of Kaliningrad physicians Elina Sushkevich and Elena Belaya was upheld. This decision was made by a panel of judges in the First Court of Appeal in Moscow, Novy Kaliningrad reports with reference to lawyer Andrey Zolotukhin.
According to investigators, in November 2018, the acting chief physician of the Kaliningrad maternity hospital No. 4, Elena Belaya, instructed neonatologist Elina Sushkevich to kill the newborn with an injection of magnesium sulfate "to save hospital resources and meet medical statistics."
In 2020, the jury in the Moscow Regional Court acquitted the doctors, but the prosecutor's office appealed this decision and returned the case back to court. After its re-examination in September 2022, the doctors were found guilty of killing a baby. Sushkevich received 9, and Belaya – 9.5 years in a general regime colony.
The defendants pleaded not guilty. Other doctors have repeatedly spoken out in their defense, including President of the National Medical Chamber Leonid Roshal and Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences Nikolai Volodin.
After that, the defense filed an appeal, which was considered in the First Court of Appeal of the city of Moscow. During the trial, it turned out that the jury was pressured by the judge during the retrial. He went into their room and convinced the defendants of their guilt.
In addition, one of the jurors said that on the way to the last meeting before the verdict, he was detained by the police "under a far-fetched pretext" and kept at the police station until lunchtime.
The defense intends to appeal the decision of the Moscow First Court of Appeal to the cassation instance.