A judge in Odessa ordered two men to read the works of Taras Shevchenko, Mark Twain and Jack London for stealing radio tape recorders

The document says that on January 6, 2021, two men entered the territory of the penalty area in Odessa and there they stole radio tape recorders and speakers from two cars. The damage they caused to the owners of the cars was estimated at UAH 1,455 and UAH 493.

The abductors hid the radio tape recorders in their backpacks, but threw them, as they were noticed by the guards of the penalty area. After some time, one of them returned to pick up the stolen goods, and was detained by the police.

The verdict says that one of the convicts is 23 years old, the second is 19 years old. Both have no previous convictions, have incomplete secondary education and work as laborers (one is officially, the other is not). The 23-year-old man grew up “in a boarding school without parents, while he did not know his mother, and his father lived his own life, creating a new family,” the court established.

The 19-year-old convict grew up in a family “with practically both parents – mother and stepfather.” “I did not study, because I immediately went to work. Currently, he works as a laborer in the Kolos farm and provides for his family. His own father died when he was six years old,” the verdict says.

The judge concluded that both defendants are not socially dangerous persons who are capable of systemic commission of criminal offenses against property. They pleaded guilty and confirmed the theft of property.

“Interrogating the accused at the hearing, the court established that they are, in fact, still underage children in terms of their development, although they are of the appropriate age. […] In general, property relations for both defendants represent a certain knowledge gap. And this is not surprising, since the education of both accused, obviously, was not sufficiently involved. This is evidenced, among other things, by the language, the construction of sentences, a small vocabulary of words, the statements themselves, the creation of complex sentences to explain their thoughts, more precisely, the lack of the possibility and even the ability to construct a complex sentence in the mind. A certain childish, almost unreasonable for an adult behavior is also evidenced by the circumstances of the offense, which show that the theft was committed by the accused in the presence of all the documents proving the identity of each (passports and other documents). At the same time, these documents were left in the backpack at the scene of the offense, “the verdict says.

The court passed the verdict taking into account mitigating circumstances – “sincere remorse and active assistance in solving a criminal offense.” The court did not establish any aggravating circumstances.

The judge decided that the punishment in the form of imprisonment was too harsh and would not correspond to the personalities of the accused or the offense they committed. He sentenced them to three years in prison, but released them from punishment, appointing a year of probation.

“The court is far from thinking that only with the help of punishments established in the criminal law it is possible to correct a person. […] Summing up the opinion on the type of punishment with a probationary period, the court considers that the accused must be additionally imposed, in addition to the general obligations provided for in Part 1 of Art. 76 of the Criminal Code, the obligation under clause 6 h. 3 Art. 76 of the Criminal Code, to adhere to the requirements established by the court on the performance of certain actions, which will consist in reading books, “the verdict says.

When drawing up the verdict, the judge quoted the Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky and the lawyer and writer Anatoly Koni, as well as excerpts from the novel “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain.

He ordered the 23-year-old and 19-year-old residents of the Belgorod-Dnestrovsky district to read the following works:

• The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain;
• the story “White Fang”;
• poem “Days pass, nights pass” by Taras Shevchenko.

“It is thanks to such works that the child should create images of the beautiful, the best, which he will carry through his whole life. And if a person was deprived of such beauty in childhood, it is necessary to compensate him for such knowledge in the present. In fact, this is a question of a person’s spiritual development, questions of love. to one’s neighbor and respect for the right of property, “Garsky wrote in the verdict.