Taisiya Osipova, a member of the Other Russia party, was taken into custody in November 2010 and was charged with drug trafficking. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, during the test purchases conducted by law enforcement officials, the detainee sold about four grams of heroin. In addition, nine grams of this substance was discovered by searching her house.
At the end of August 2012, the Smolensk court passed a new verdict for Taisia Osipova, an activist of The Other Russia. For drug trafficking, the woman received eight years in prison instead of ten. Osipova’s defense has already made a statement that the verdict will be appealed to a higher authority.
Mikhail Fedotov, who is the head of the presidential Human Rights Council, expressed the view that the sentence imposed by Taisiya Osipova is a miscarriage of justice. The public prosecutor requested four years for the general regime colony for Taisia. Her lawyers insisted on the complete innocence of the woman.
Oppositionists believe that Osipova’s arrest is interconnected with the political activities of her husband, Sergei Fomchenkov, who is a member of the executive committee of the Other Russia. The prosecution was fabricated, in their opinion, in order to interfere with the registration of the party.
In turn, the Ministry of Internal Affairs in the summer of 2011 it was stated that this matter has no political context. As a result, on December 29, 2011, the Smolensky court sentenced Osipova, in whose defense repeated actions were held in St. Petersburg and Moscow. She was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The lawyers of the accused appealed against this decision, as a result of which on March 13, 2012 a new trial began, during which the number of episodes charged by Osipova was reduced from five to three. The court did not respond to appeals by lawyers to commute the punishment for the defendant in connection with her poor health and the presence of her young child.
At the beginning of 2012, Dmitry Medvedev, who was still the president of the Russian Federation, expressed his opinion about Osipova’s sentence at a meeting with MSU students. According to him, he became too severe, the President announced his readiness to personally ask the prosecutor's office to re-examine this matter. According to Medvedev, a ten-year prison term imposed on a woman with a small child is an unnecessarily harsh punishment. At the same time, he noted that there are cases when narcotic substances are specially planted to knock out the necessary evidence. As noted by the press service of the Russian government, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has not changed his attitude to the case of Osipova, but considers it unacceptable to intervene in the affairs of the court, hoping that the verdict will be adequate to the deed.
