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.
If long prison sentences were the primary factor in reduction in recidivism, then the US would have among the lowest recidivism rate in the world. It doesn’t. So, while longer sentences may lower recidivism some, they are far from the only way to do so, much less the most effective way to do so. Plenty of countries have rehabilitative prisons with significantly shorter sentences and yet have half or less the recidivism rate of the United States.
I never said that. Rehabilitative prisons are the main component in reducing recidivism, but short sentences that don’t punish criminals for their crimes reduce confidence in victims that justice has been served. Rehabilitating the criminal isn’t the only thing that matters; making them suffer for the harm they’ve done is also important. As much as people would like to believe we can excise that from our judicial systems, it can’t be done. You will simply get vigilantes.
Yes I get it, you believe in personally bringing harm to both inmate and guards by forcing guards to perpetuate human rights abuses upon the inmates. So why is there no vigilante Justice in countries with rehabilitative prison systems, if it’s just so inevitable? Is it possible that your myopic view of humanity is tainted by a ethnocentric perspective? Because most victims of most crimes aren’t frothing at the mouth for punishment. They want JUSTICE, as you said. Justice and Punishment are not the same. Nor does our system provide Justice for victims, in nearly any case.
If your concern is Justice, then you should learn of Restorative Justice models, and how they function.