Espionage, Incarceration, and Plea Bargaining in Georgia

The New York Times has a very interesting article regarding espionage, incarceration, and incentives to plead guilty in Georgia.

TBILISI, Georgia — Last week, several days after the photographer Giorgi Abdaladze confessed to selling classified documents to Russia’s foreign intelligence service, he was released without being sentenced to a prison term or even given a fine. After Georgian officials had publicly excoriated Mr. Abdaladze as being a participant in a brazen espionage campaign, his 15-day prosecution ended as abruptly as it had begun.

The brief case against Mr. Abdaladze and three other photographers was a baffling one, even in a season of high Georgian anxiety about covert Russian activities. Because it ended in a plea agreement, like an overwhelming number of criminal prosecutions in Georgia, it will never be resolved in court, and all four of the accused risk spending years in prison if they violate their deal by speaking about it.

It has left behind a deep rift between parts of Georgian society — those who believe Russian agents have been able to infiltrate the closest circles around President Mikheil Saakashvili, and those who believe the government has entangled innocent people in its claims against Russia. Western officials, who must weigh whether to confront Russia over a series of Georgian charges, have been cautious in their assessment.

“The evidence is more circumstantial than direct, but that doesn’t exclude the possibility that there is more,” said a senior Western diplomat, who called the case “a bit of a Rorschach test for this society.”

“The real tragedy in this is corrosion of public trust in law enforcement, and especially the judicial system,” said the diplomat, who requested anonymity in keeping with protocol. “People in Western capitals look at this and say, ‘Is this paranoia taken to an illogical extreme? What are you seeing that the rest of us don’t see?’ ”

The photographers, meanwhile, have returned to public life as confessed traitors....

It was a jaw-dropping case from the very beginning, not only because of the way the suspects were detained — plainclothes officers knocked on their doors between 2 and 3 a.m., waking their families and searching the premises — but also because of who they were.

As Mr. Saakashvili’s personal photographer, Irakli Gedenidze, 37, could be seen for years scrambling after the mercurial president, like a shadow with a zoom lens. His wife, Natia, also a photographer, was detained with him but released two days later on bail. Zurab Kurtsikidze, 38, worked for European Pressphoto Agency, a news service based in Frankfurt.

Mr. Abdaladze, 38, worked on contract for the Foreign Ministry but also chased after breaking news; his 2008 photograph of a woman reaching up from the flaming wreckage of a building became one of the iconic images from Georgia’s brief war with Russia.

Soon afterward, Georgia’s Interior Ministry began releasing evidence that the three men — whose longtime friendship is documented on their Facebook pages — were in fact functioning as an underground spy cell.

Mr. Gedenidze and his wife gave confessions almost immediately. In a video recording shown on Georgian news broadcasts, Mr. Gedenidze said Mr. Kurtsikidze had initially purchased pictures on behalf of his photo agency, but then blackmailed him into passing on documents, which he suspected were sent to foreign intelligence agents....

Public pressure over the case was mounting, however. Journalists protested outside the Interior Ministry, demanding that the government release hard evidence to substantiate its case. Mr. Abdaladze, who had hired a prominent lawyer in the political opposition, published a letter saying that the charges were in retaliation for him having distributed photographs of a May 26 rally that had been violently broken up by the police. He vowed to maintain his innocence.

A few days later, as legal teams began preparing for a September trial, the case came to a halt. Lawyers for Mr. Kurtsikidze and Mr. Abdaladze announced that their clients had agreed to plead guilty to espionage. They were released on probation, with conditional sentences ranging from six months to three years. Georgia’s public defender, Giorgi Tughushi, said that he had met with the defendants while they were in custody and that none of them said they had come under physical or psychological pressure to confess.

In some ways, it was not an unusual outcome. In 2010, 80 percent of criminal cases in Georgia ended in plea agreements, according to a recent report from Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s human rights commissioner. Because of tough sentencing practices and a near certainty of conviction at trial — the average acquittal rate in trial courts last year was 0.2 percent — the plea-bargaining system has become difficult for defendants to resist, even if they would like to argue their innocence in court, the report warned.

Read the entire article here.