Taisiya Osipova, a member of the Other Russia party, was arrested in November 2010 and charged with drug dealing. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, during the test purchases, which were carried out by law enforcement officers, the detainee was sold about four grams of heroin. In addition, nine grams of this substance were found during a search of her house.
At the end of August 2012, the Smolensk court passed a new verdict for the Other Russia activist Taisiya Osipova. For drug trafficking, the woman received eight years in prison instead of ten. Osipova's defense has already made a statement that the verdict will be appealed to a higher instance.
Mikhail Fedotov, who is the head of the presidential Human Rights Council, expressed the opinion that the verdict handed down to Taisiya Osipova was a miscarriage of justice. The state prosecutor asked Taisia for four years in a general regime colony. Her lawyers insisted on the woman's complete innocence.
Oppositionists believe that Osipova's arrest is interconnected with the political activities of her husband Sergei Fomchenkov, who is a member of the executive committee of the Other Russia. The charge was fabricated, in their opinion, in order to interfere with the registration of the party.
In turn, the Ministry of Internal Affairs announced in the summer of 2011 that this case had no political implications. As a result, on December 29, 2011, the Smolensk court sentenced Osipova, in whose defense repeated actions were held in St. Petersburg and Moscow. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The defendant's lawyers appealed this decision, as a result of which on March 13, 2012, a new trial of the case began, during which the number of episodes incriminated by Osipova was reduced from five to three. The court did not respond to calls by lawyers to mitigate the sentence for the defendant in connection with her poor health and the presence of a young child.
At the beginning of 2012, Dmitry Medvedev, who was then still the president of the Russian Federation, at a meeting with students of Moscow State University, expressed his opinion about the verdict of Osipova. According to him, he became too harsh, the President announced his readiness to personally ask the prosecutor's office to re-examine this case. According to Medvedev, a ten-year prison sentence for a woman with a small child is an unnecessarily harsh punishment. At the same time, he noted that there are cases when drugs are specially planted in order to knock out the necessary testimony. As noted by the press service of the Russian government, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has not changed his attitude to the Osipova case, but he considers it unacceptable to interfere in court affairs, hoping that the verdict will be adequate for what he had done.
