The St. Petersburg City Court changed the verdict passed in December 2020 against the former associate professor of St. Petersburg State University Oleg Sokolov. By the decision of the appeal commission, the material evidence in the case – weapons and ammunition seized in Sokolov’s apartment – should be transferred to the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region instead of being destroyed, as the court of first instance decided earlier. As for the rest, it was decided to leave the sentence to Sokolov unchanged, and the appeal of lawyer Sergei Lukyanov was dismissed.
Thus, the 65-year-old former associate professor of the university will continue to serve his sentence for the murder of 24-year-old graduate student Anastasia Yeshchenko (part 1 of article 105 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation) and illegal possession of weapons (part 1 of article 222 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation). The court of first instance sentenced Sokolov to 12.5 years in a maximum security penal colony.
In his appeal, Mr. Lukyanov asked to admit that Sokolov committed the crime in a state of passion, and asked to take into account the alleged immoral behavior of the deceased as a mitigating circumstance. The lawyer emphasized that the accusation as the causes of the conflict that ended in the death of Anastasia Yeshchenko indicated the mutual jealousy of Mrs. Yeshchenko and Sokolov: him towards her acquaintances and her towards his children. And only the historian’s jealousy remained in the verdict. Meanwhile, as Sokolov also insisted in his last word, it was precisely the negative statements about the historian’s children that allegedly served as the reason that Sokolov committed the murder.
The appeal commission did not agree with these arguments, deciding that Sokolov should not be mitigated.
More details about the appeal – in the publication “E” “The dismemberment historian asks for a commutation of the sentence.”
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