On Tuesday, the Moscow District Court sentenced Kaliningrad doctors Elina Sushkevich and Elena Belaya to nine and nine and a half years in prison for the murder of a premature baby (part 2 of article 105 of the Russian Criminal Code) Federation “Deliberately small for the helpless criminal or killing another person). They were also banned from working in their profession for three years after their release.
“Assign Sushkevich to nine years in prison with a prison sentence in a penal colony … Sentencing Belaya to nine years and six months in a penal colony.” .
They were also banned from working in their profession for three years after their release. The prosecutor’s office demanded that each defendant be sentenced to 13 years in prison and a three-year prison term with a ban on employment after release.
Earlier, the jury decided to find the doctors guilty and undeserving of tolerance. The defense has already stated that it will appeal the decision, believing that the judge actually took the position of the prosecution, thereby influencing the jurors’ decision.
A question of guilt
In recent years, this is one of the most resonant “medical” criminal cases in Russia. The main question debated in the medical community is whether proxy officers are guilty. Chief physician of the maternity hospital and anesthesiologist-resuscitator in the death of a premature newborn weighing 700 grams.
investigation, doctors deliberately killed a baby, the defense insists on the absence of malicious intent. According to the prosecutor’s office, a woman admitted to the maternity hospital No. 4 in Kaliningrad in November 2018, 23-24 of her pregnancy. She gave birth to a baby boy weighing about 700 grams in the last week.
England claims that acting. The chief physician of this maternity hospital, Belaya, decided to kill the newborn, to whom the anesthesiologist-resuscitator of the regional perinatal center Sushkevich, who came to the scene as part of the resuscitation team and injected the baby with magnesium sulfate, died from it.
According to investigators, Belaya’s decision to kill the boy is linked. with serious pathologies of a premature newborn and fearing a deterioration in performance told Sushkevich to give the drug. further “Intentionally incorrect information was entered in the date of birth that the fact of fetal death was found”.
The defense insists that the fact of drug administration has not been proven. The same position was held by the jury, as a result of which in December 2020 the doctors were acquitted. The defense also found that the boy’s mother had taken a magnesium-containing medication during pregnancy.
To go forward
On December 10, 2020, the jury found the doctors not guilty. Representatives of the injured party and the Attorney General’s Office appealed, stating that the jury was under pressure from the public and the media. The Prosecutor’s Office appealed the decision, and at the end of May 2021, at the request of the 1st Prosecutor General of the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court moved the hearings from Kaliningrad to the Moscow District Court.
The reversal of the acquittal decision created an indignation in the professional community. That’s why Leonid Roshal, head of the National Medical Association of Physicians, called for the doctors to be released from custody and said he was ready to sit in the pretrial detention center in their place.
During the investigation in Kaliningrad, doctors were placed under house arrest. After the completion of the trials, Sushkevich returned to work in the regional perinatal center, and Belaya served as the deputy chief of the maternity hospital No. On November 5, 2021, at the first meeting at the Moscow District Court, Sushkevich and Belaya were detained, announcing the decision along with the fact that they did not have registration in the Moscow region. SIZO No. in Pechatniki. They were placed in 6.
“The child would never die”
One of the key witnesses in the case is Alena Sukhar (Kiyanenko), a nurse at the No. 4 maternity hospital, who was on duty on the night of the child’s death on November 6, 2018. The defense required the nurse’s statement during the trial to record it in the case file (she had previously testified during the preliminary investigation). However, Sukhar did not attend the hearing three times, and the court refused to accept the woman’s testimony in the case.
Doctors’ lawyer Kamil Babasov in an interview with Kommersant newspaper declarationHe said the trial would go “with an accusatory bias, to put it mildly.” According to him, the judge dismissed all requests from the defense, including a panel of chartered neonatologists and a request to be heard by a toxicologist. The court found the claims unfounded.
“The court said that everything is clear to everyone. But we still have many questions for experts, first of all, when it comes to calculating the concentration of magnesium sulfate in the blood of a baby. We believe that the expert opinions in the case file are unreliable.”
Larisa Guseva, the lawyer of the victims’ family, in turn, satisfied with the process and awaits a guilty verdict from the jury.
“I believe that the actions of Belaya and Sushkevich are correctly characterized and it is unacceptable to talk about whether the child is in pain. There is no such concept in the legislation. There are only the concepts of “alive” and “stillborn”.. He was born alive, and the doctors had to save him in any case, ”said Guseva.
Guseva referred to the words of the head of the group of forensic experts: At the beginning of the trial in Kaliningrad, she told the court that the child
“I was alive and had no intention of dying for the next few hours, maybe days, or maybe even nothing”.
Professionals’ doubts
The Russian Association of Neonatologists, the National Medical Chamber headed by Leonid Roshal, and a number of head freelance specialists of the Ministry of Health of the Russian Federation stood up for doctors. Venture doctors launched the #YaElinaSushkevich campaign on social networks, and a petition to defend the neonatologist gathered more than 270,000 signatures. Sushkevich’s colleagues reacted extremely negatively to the annulment of the acquittal and the return of the case to the court, describing the process as “demonstrative”. According to the doctors, the indictment and trial are mostly based on the ethical aspect of the death of a baby and the objective medical indications given by the defense and expert community are not taken into account.
“As a community we support Elina (Sushkevich) and are absolutely sure of her innocence as we have listed every letter of the available case materials. We believe that the verdict can only lead to acquittal,” Diana Mustafina-Bredikhina, a lawyer from the Russian Association of Neonatologists, told Kommersant.
However, Igor Artyukhov, editor-in-chief of the Medical Russia portal, discovered “a number of contradictions” during his own analysis of the conclusions of forensic experts, the arguments of the defense and prosecution. On the morning of November 6, 2018, he recorded an audio recording of a fragment of a conversation between Elena Belaya and her subordinates by Tatyana Sokolova, the head of the maternity ward of the maternity hospital No. In the recording, Belaya scolds doctors for providing resuscitation care to a child in serious condition: “… You set up everyone, including the self-employed obstetrician-gynecologist. Therefore, we sit down and rewrite history and do prenatal (prenatal death – death of the fetus during pregnancy. – approx. “socialbites.ca”). According to him, many doctors, including neonatologists, “understood what really happened to the child.”
“After the release of this recording, the defense suddenly began to publicly accuse the reassignment of negligence. It is unclear where lawyers should now put all the explanations that the woman in childbirth should not be examined and that the baby’s chances of survival are insignificant,” he said.
According to Nikolai Volodin, Honored Doctor of Russia, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the baby was not provided with proper assistance after birth, and for some reason the court does not insist brings key witnesses to the case.
“The prosecutor’s office is not taking any measures to ensure that nurse Alena Sukhar, who previously testified while swaddling a newborn baby at 6 a.m., appears in court for her testimony. found it – 700 grams, lying in a pool of blood. And no one thought of doing anything to start saving their life! Upon arrival, Dr. Sushkevich immediately asked to determine the blood type of the child and the Rh factor for an urgent order of donor blood, and injected him intravenously with physiological saline and soda. But time has passed irrevocably! said Volodin.
Neonatologist, Professor, Head of Neonatology, NINI Pirogova Marina Degtyareva insists on the failure of the charges. In his opinion, The formula used to calculate the concentration of a substance in an infant’s body is not used in the medical community.. He also reminded that to determine the concentration of the drug in the blood, it is necessary to examine either the blood or the placenta, but not the blood in the organs.
Calculations of the concentration of magnesium in the blood serum of a newborn baby, performed as part of a forensic medical examination, are based on extensive statements and assumptions and have not been proven. The logical conclusions of experts do not take into account the laws of human physiology, and therefore UNACCEPTABLE EVIDENCE of the cause of death of a child too early, ”Degtyareva said in an open letter.
Source: Gazeta
