A Russian convicted murderer who was sentenced to 11 years in prison after he killed his girlfriend and put her body through a meat grinder has been pardoned after fighting against Ukraine, his mother said.
The mother of Dmitry Zelensky told the Russian media news outlet 59.RU that her son was pardoned after serving less than half of his sentence.
Zelensky, a veteran of the Second Chechen War, confessed to the 2018 murder of his 27-year-old girlfriend, Tatiana Melekhina, in 2019, 59.RU reported.
He admitted to strangling her to death after a quarrel, before disposing of her body in a horrific way to try to cover up his tracks, the media outlet said.
According to 59.RU, Zelensky told investigators during an interrogation that he dismembered her body, processed it in a meat grinder, collected the bones in three bags, and threw them into the river.
He only got 11 years for that?
I would say ~10 years is normal for a murder in Germany and other European countries. I don’t know about current Russia but here the idea is jail time should lead to rehabilitation and a bit of punishment. In the US it is much more focused on punishment.
A murder verdict carries a mandatory life sentence in Germany, you might be thinking of manslaughter, which has a minimum of five. Life-long means possibility of parole after no fewer than 15 years, the average is 18.9 years, 13% sit longer than 25 years including, indeed, life-long. Not to speak of the possibility of preventive detention.
10 years for ending someone else’s life? I’m glad we have longer sentences for that here in the U.S. Don’t get me wrong–I’m all for prison reform and introducing rehabilitative elements to reduce recidivism, but Europeans seem to have more concern for criminals than they do for the victims of crime.
Rehabilitation is how you show concern for victims of crime, not long sentences.
To be fair it’s not going to bring the person back and proper rehabilitation punishes the person through realization of wrong doing and can give back to the world and communities through redemption.
Sure 10 years but the guilt and disappointment is eternal. I think the rehab program and capabilities mean more than the time frame and clearly the science is on team rehab.
10 years in a Russian prison is an extremely brutal punishment. Here’s a mild example of what happens there https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1kQblKeOT4E
