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The testimony phase has ended in Zadorov's retrial: Will the panel of judges reverse the conviction? - Walla! news

2022-06-10T19:25:16.873Z


Despite the judges' request to focus on four major issues in the retrial, it stretched across a much larger sheet in the seven months it lasted. From the flood of evidence and testimony presented, it was possible to get the impression that a basic doubt of reasonable doubt for conviction had begun to nest among the judges. In the coming months will publish the verdict


The testimony phase has ended in Zadorov's retrial: Will the panel of judges reverse the conviction?

Despite the judges' request to focus on four major issues in the retrial, it stretched across a much larger sheet in the seven months it lasted.

From the flood of evidence and testimony presented, it was possible to get the impression that a basic doubt of reasonable doubt for conviction had begun to nest among the judges.

In the coming months will publish the verdict

Eli Ashkenazi

10/06/2022

Friday, 10 June 2022, 21:00 Updated: 22:17

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In the video: The Zadorov trial - on behalf of the defense, an expert in Russian law testified (Photo: Shlomi Gabay)

At the end of seven compressed, intense and passionate months and a half, the stage of hearing the evidence in the trial of Roman Zadorov, who is accused of the murder of Tair Rada, ended this week.

For comparison - in the original law this phase lasted more than three years, in the years 2010-2007.



In about two months the parties will submit their written summaries to the court and then present them to him.

A few weeks later, the verdict of the panel of judges will be announced - Asher Kola, Danny Tzarfati and Tamar Nissim-Shai.



The murder case of 14-year-old Tair in December 2006 has not been quiet since, but it seems that the stage that ended this week in the Nazareth District Court has managed to overshadow all the storms the affair has known so far;

In Hall No. 11, two and sometimes three lengthy hearings were held each week.

The judges sought to focus on a central channel of the flow of evidence, but many times the hearings branched out into sub-channels with many details, evidence and data, although the tribunal occasionally begged the parties not to continue to multiply trees that would make it difficult for the panel to see the forest.

More on Walla!

Once again the judge turned himself into a story in the Zdorov trial: the protocol that gives a terrifying glimpse of what happened in the courtroom

To the full article

A murder case that has not known silence since its inception.

Tair Rada (Photo: Ginny)

It seemed that despite the ocean of data we were hoping for, the judges had mastered the material well, knew and studied it.

But the judges had another significant task - to succeed in overcoming the passions and emotions that were an integral part of the trial that even then became a trial with a high media profile and broad public interest, and this task was not always met with complete success.



In his retrial, Hanan Meltzer, a Supreme Court justice, recommended that the parties consider concentrating on four key issues: the presence of foreign footprints at the murder scene, the leak of blood on the heel of the shoe on the toilet lid, the blood stain of the deceased found in the third cell and the Dan's vision. A. The mitochondrial.



But the trial stretched across a much larger sheet, even though the judges urged the parties to convene on the main issues Meltzer pointed out



.

The invention of foreign traces

Defense counsel, attorney Yarom Halevi, challenged the assumption that an "anonymous rescuer" who arrived at the murder scene after Tair's body was found, left the same traces.

He asked to show the court that there was no "anonymous rescuer" and insisted on reaching everyone who was inside the toilet cubicle after finding the body.

According to him, many people did arrive on the night of December 6, 2006 at the Nofei Golan school in Katzrin, but in the end very few entered the toilet cubicle where the body was found, and among those few did not appear in the police investigation because one of them left the same footprints. And could not be attributed to any of them.



However, the retrial revealed that among the people who were at the murder scene, not everyone’s shoe soles were examined.

For example: Yossi Levy, the intelligence officer of the Katzrin police station, was at one point alone inside the services compound, and his shoes were not inspected.



It is very possible that in this evidence Adv. Halevi managed to cross the threshold of proof necessary to raise a reasonable doubt as to the guilt of his client,

Blood flow on the heel of the shoe on the toilet lid

This issue is at the heart of the retrial.

According to the defense, the murdered woman's blood on the foreign footprint could only have been spilled near the murder, so the foreign footprint was drowned very close to the murder, and not by an anonymous extractor about five hours later when the body was found and removed from the scene.

Meaning - the foreign trace belongs to the killer whose identity is unknown, according to the defense.



Given the importance of this section, both parties presented weighty arguments and evidence in an attempt to convince the court of the merits of their claims.

The defense testified that rescue workers were at the scene and treated at rest, in an attempt to show their caution so as not to "contaminate" the evidence at the scene, and brought in experts who insisted that it was impossible that several hours after the murder blood could have leaked from the body.



The prosecution brought witnesses who also saw hours after the murder blood marks that dripped from the deceased's body after she was moved, as well as expert witnesses at murder scenes, who insisted that an amount of blood like the one found on the shoe could have leaked hours after the murder, for example. .



Both parties presented good evidence in this section, and it was possible to get the impression that here, too, Halevy succeeded in crossing the threshold of reasonable doubt required for acquittal.

The blood stain of the deceased discovered in the third cell

The origin of this issue is in the mistaken retrial of the Institute of Forensic Medicine.

It turned out that small blood marks found on the toilet paper facility of cell number 3, adjacent to cell 2 where the murder occurred, were mistakenly categorized as those found in cell 2. This section was not devoted much time in the retrial.

If the judges regard the previous sections as having succeeded in arousing reasonable doubt in them, then this section will surely join them in order to tip the weight to the side of the creditor.

Mitochondrial DNA vision

This is a sub-section of a sub-branch of a lawsuit.



Adv. Halevy

was not satisfied with the main task of creating a reasonable doubt, and also focused on his attempt to prove that not only his client is not the killer, but also that the identity of the killer is known.

Pointing an accusing finger at Kravchenko. The defense's claim was based, among other things, on the results of a mitochondrial DNA test of her hair that was found at the murder scene.

Mitochondrial DNA is extracted from rootless hairs, which cannot be tested by DNA production.

This finding is much less significant than normal DNA.



The laboratory tests revealed that in one of the three hypotheses there may be a match to the genetic profile of Adir Habani, who was the partner of Ola Kravchenko and claims to be the killer.



Both sides have brought in renowned experts on this subject.

Despite the amount of time the court devoted to the defense's claims against Ola Kravchenko, the judges did not appear to be convinced of the defense's claims and did not take this path.

Moreover, it was apparent that the field of mitochondrial DNA testing could not yet constitute weighty evidence for the purpose of conviction, but only aiding evidence in the case of more significant evidence or alternatively as evidence that denies and aids in gaining.



On this issue, as on other issues, an expert from the Institute of Forensic Medicine testified on behalf of the defense.

A total of five employees of the institute testified for the defense while only one employee testified on behalf of the prosecution.

In this case, it is clear that this case caused a deep rift between the institute and the State Attorney's Office.

During his testimony as a defense witness, the director of the institute, Dr. Chen Kugel, slammed the lawsuit: "I have a feeling that you in the State Attorney's Office have not yet digested the fact that the Institute of Forensic Medicine no longer works for you." "Part of your war with Dr. Hess, at the old institute, at that time, and today you can not retreat, you make it a matter of life.


"

The claim received a huge response, especially in the media.

Kravchenko in retrial (Photo: Flash 90, David Cohen)

Because this is a retrial, and this means that the trial starts from the beginning, the parties did not adopt Judge Meltzer's recommendation to focus only on those four issues and dealt with additional issues.

These are the significant ones:

Confession and reconstruction of Zadorov's murder

As for Zadorov's confession to the detainee in the detention cell and his interrogators, and the reconstruction of the murder, all the judges who discussed this case, including Judge Yoram Danziger of the Supreme Court, who won a minority opinion on Zadorov, on appeal, attributed high credibility and authenticity to the defendant's confession.



Danziger found that "it was not found that there was a serious defect in the applicant's confession to the informant, from the applicant's arrest and his investigations with the police, to the confession he made, for the first time, to him."

Despite the difficult opening figures in this section, the defense devoted extensive space to him and seemed to have managed to create a rift among the judges, or at least in one or two of them.

Among other things, the judges did not hide their perplexity that after his arrest, Zadorov was represented by a lawyer from the field of civil law, who does not speak Russian and who did not meet the suspect before it went out to reconstruct the murder.



It is important to note that Zadorov's testimony was convoluted and inconsistent and despite the defense attorney's many attempts to portray the defendant as a stupid and weak person, his testimony actually mentioned what the Supreme Court justices wrote about him: "The appellant's inconsistency Of one who tries to weave a fictitious version. Manipulative and sophisticated. "

Detailed details

In this section, too, the previous instances gave significant weight to the defendant's familiarity with details that only the killer could have known.

It seems that even in this section the defense has managed to erode even a little.

It is not a question of creating a doubt that alone has the power to skew the acquittal side, but if in the core issues a reasonable doubt has arisen in the hearts of the judges, then this section can add a few more factors in the balance of the trial towards the acquittal side.



An example of this was the confused testimony of Reuven Janah.

Janah is the one who called Zadorov on the eve of the murder in an attempt to convince him to come to work at his house the next morning.

The reason for the request was that "in any case, Zadorov will not be able to continue the floor work at the school the next day because something happened to the student there."

After this conversation, Zadorov told his wife, who was interested in the content of the conversation, that "a girl fell in the bathroom."

In the retrial it became clear that Janah already knew some of the details of finding the body, prior to that phone call.

This has not come up before.

It is worth emphasizing, however, that the core of the testimony has not changed and he insisted that he did not state to Zadorov that the murder scene was a toilet cubicle and the word "toilet" was not mentioned.

Zdorov (Photo: Eli Ashkenazi)

The trial dealt with many other issues, such as the claim that the defendant inserted a toothpick into the keyhole in the shelter where he left the clothes he was wearing at the time of the murder;

His actions after the time of the murder - like drinking coffee in the teachers' room, buying a drink at the school canteen, snuff files that were discovered on his computer and turned out to have been installed in it before he bought it.

Nor can the weight of those subsections alone skew the judges' decision, but in the case of acquittal some may join the weight of the reasonable doubt.



Issues also arose that were not fully investigated by the police.

It turned out, for example, that several hours after the murder, Zadorov had an unusual phone call for him in those days, with a friend who asked him to help him with renovations.

The retrial revealed that he did accede to the request and worked in addition to building in the house next to the school.

In connection with his testimony that he buried his pants in concrete, this detail was not examined at all.



If the same reasonable doubt does not arise in the core sections, then even a gnawing on one of the sub-sections will not tip the scales for credit.

This was also the case when Zadorov's appeal to the Supreme Court was rejected.

For example, the judges then accepted the defense's position that the murder was committed with a serrated and dishonest knife, and did not attach weight to the evidence presented by the prosecution that the soles of Zadorov's shoe soles were found on the deceased's body, and yet convicted him of murder.

Nests in it an element of reasonable doubt.

Judge Cola (Photo: Flash 90, David Cohen)

In the hearings in the retrial more than once it was possible to get the impression that among the judges Cola and a Frenchman were already nesting with considerable intensity the same element of reasonable doubt.

Thus, for example, the head of the tribunal, Judge Cola, told the prosecution that it was "difficult to convince" about two of the substantive issues that are at the heart of the retrial.



Judge Cola said this about the possibility of blood dripping from her body several hours after death due to light touches on her body and regarding the "anonymous extractor" script that allegedly imprinted shoe prints at the murder scene that it is not clear who imprinted them.

He also said at the same hearing, during the defendant's testimony, that "the arena speaks. She shouts" and in view of a question addressed by the prosecution "What is she shouting?", He replied that "51 percent is sufficient for defense, while the prosecution should prove 99 percent" and added - There is no doubt. "

To this he also added the statement that "there are a thousand and one very problematic things."



The tension between the head of the court and the prosecution was overt and unusual.

The matter came to the point that the judge claimed that a personal campaign was being conducted against him and that he was being pressured by various factors, so much so that he considered disqualifying himself.

He demanded that the prosecution trust him.

In response, the prosecution requested that the hearings be adjourned until the judge clarified his remarks.

The system seemed to understand the magnitude of the damage caused in the face of the heated confrontation and despite the judge's harsh allegations of pressure on him, they were not clarified.



In a few months, the verdict will be heard in a trial that dealt with a 16-year-old affair, but it seems that the effects of the trial will not soon pass.

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Source: walla

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