Paul Klebnikov was editor of the Russian edition of Forbes.
Mr. Rybin, 46, happened to sit on the jury that acquitted two Chechen men in the killing of Mr. Klebnikov, an American journalist who moved here to publish the Russian-language edition of Forbes magazine. An intense man who has migrated from medicine to publishing to finance during the post-Soviet era, Mr. Rybin argued strenuously against the verdict and filled seven spiral notebooks with his dense, neat handwriting during the trial.
Three years later, he is still so tormented by the outcome that he has repeatedly violated court rules by discussing it publicly.
“To the end of my life,” he said, “it won’t leave me.”
During the United States-Russia summit meeting last week, American officials again lobbied Russian officials to push harder on the Klebnikov case, which has dissipated into a collection of loose ends and dead ends. Russian prosecutors announced that they would begin working with a local representative of the United States Department of Justice.
It was not supposed to turn out this way. Mr. Klebnikov’s relatives say that four years ago, Vladimir V. Putin, then the president, told them he knew who the killers were and urged them to have faith in the Russian justice system.
What happened after that, though, underlined some of the failures of that system. Prosecutors identified five Chechen men they suspected of ordering and carrying out the killing but were able to arrest only two suspects accused of being hit men. The closed trial ended in acquittals. Though Russia’s Supreme Court overturned the verdict and called for a new trial, one of the suspects had already fled. At that point, the process apparently quietly stalled.
“It gets whittled down,” said Peter Klebnikov, who flew to Moscow last week for a ceremony marking the fifth anniversary of his brother’s fatal shooting on a Moscow street. “They chip away at the resolve of the family and the people who care about it. It’s death by 1,000 blows.”
The Klebnikov case has been frustrated by many of the same missteps that doomed the trial in the killing of the Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya.
Both involved bit players who were prosecuted largely on circumstantial evidence. Russian prosecutors have no tradition of, and little legal basis for, persuading low-level criminals to testify against their bosses.
In both cases, key figures simply vanished, into Chechnya or overseas. Both cases were tried before juries, which are relatively new and rare in Russia and which have proved vulnerable to threats and intimidation. And both cases were so heavily freighted with international political meaning that many concluded that, as Peter Klebnikov put it, “powerful sources in the government don’t want a successful conclusion to the case.”
Igor Korotkov, the lawyer who successfully defended one of the Chechen suspects, Kazbek Dukuzov, in the murder trial, dismisses that idea.
“It was a matter of honor for them to find the culprits and crack this case,” he said. “This probably hurt more than it helped, because the investigators were under pressure, the case attracted so much attention. The desire to catch the criminals as soon as possible made them rush, and this interfered with the quality of their work.”
For Mr. Rybin, participating in a jury trial was a matter of both curiosity and duty. Jury trials were revived in Russia 16 years ago, but are used only in select cases, usually for serious crimes like murder. Russian juries acquit defendants in 15 to 20 percent of cases, compared with less than 1 percent for judges, said Leonid Nikitinsky, a legal reporter at the newspaper Novaya Gazeta. The Supreme Court frequently overturns jury verdicts, which Russian law allows.
Jurors often emerge from the experience profoundly affected, said Mr. Nikitinsky, who has founded a club for former jurors.
Certainly, that is what happened to Mr. Rybin. “From the beginning to the end,” he said, “I took it as a kind of mission.”
As soon as they gathered, Mr. Rybin said, the jurors could tell they had been assigned to something big.
Mr. Klebnikov’s murder was one of four cases being prosecuted against the two Chechen men, Mr. Dukuzov and Musa Vakhayev, and testimony sometimes took a wild turn. At one point, the jurors watched from a window as a witness fled the courthouse pursued by five men in masks, then was tackled, handcuffed and put in the back of a van.
“The judge called a break, because what else could he do?” Mr. Rybin said. “It was just like a movie.”
Mr. Rybin’s story cannot be verified, because no other jurors have come forward publicly, but he said he was sure the jury came under pressure to vote for acquittal. He said the eight women on the jury were “monolithic” at the outset in their certainty that the defendants were guilty. But over time, “they began to change their position,” he said, with one urging the other jurors to research the case on the Internet, which is a violation of court rules.
