Legal News

Moscow Lawyer Gives Birth in State Custody

By Jennifer Forsyth

A lawyer convicted of embezzlement as part of a government investigation of her employer, the Yukos oil company, and its then-top executive, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, gave birth today at an undisclosed hospital while remaining in state custody. Here’s the previous LB coverage.

The saga of Svetlana Bakhmina (pictured with previous two children) has garnered international attention not only because many supporters say she is an innocent victim of a feud between Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Putin, but also because of the circumstances under which she became pregnant.

Here’s this from the Washington Post: “After one of Bakhmina’s high school classmates wrote an online appeal in late September urging Putin’s successor, Dmitry Medvedev, to pardon her, more than 87,000 people signed an Internet petition on her behalf. A host of prominent figures in politics and the arts also called on Medvedev to grant her clemency, and the case emerged as an unusually public test of the new president’s values and political clout.

Bakhmina won public sympathy in part because she became pregnant in March, when prison officials granted her a furlough for good behavior and let her visit her husband and their two young boys.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on November 28, 2008 (boomark / email).