The prosecutor wanted to influence the verdict in the murder case through her stepson, a juror

Ekaterina Pavlova, the former prosecutor of the Nizhny Novgorod Regional Prosecutor's Office, secured the appointment of her stepson as the foreman of the jury in order to achieve a guilty verdict, Izvestia found out during its own investigation.

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Sergei Balikhin, nicknamed Golos, has been serving a life sentence since 2014.

We are talking about the case of Nikolai Kukushkin, a children's coach from Nizhny Novgorod, who is accused of murdering Russian guardsman Mikhail Rashoyan in 2021. Izvestia obtained video recordings of conversations between a man who looked like Lev Pavlov, the foreman of the jury. In them, he tells his girlfriend that he was included in the board on the initiative of his stepmother in order to quickly complete the case, which has been dragging on for the fifth year.

"It is necessary that [the foreman] has his own people who will definitely put him in jail," Pavlov explains the reason why he was appointed to the board.

He went on to say that he had already tried to influence the opinion of two jurors.

"I walked around with one after the meeting, I contacted the second one — I know her — and conveyed my point. There are two grannies and two incomprehensible types left there, but I'll put the squeeze on them," he said.

According to him, his stepmother convinced him to reach a guilty verdict because "she needs the case to be closed." At the same time, Pavel admitted that during the selection of the jury, he hid information about his relationship with a representative of the prosecutor's office.

Ekaterina Pavlova until recently headed the department of state prosecutors of the Nizhny Novgorod Region Prosecutor's office. In her case, the prosecution lost in the first trial against Nikolai Kukushkin — in 2022, the jury acquitted him, considering that at the time of the murder the defendant acted within the limits of necessary self-defense. But the prosecutor's office appealed the acquittal, it was overturned, and the case was sent for a new trial. The second panel of jurors was dissolved. The case is currently being heard with the third panel.

Lev Pavlov, in an interview with Izvestia, confirmed his relationship with Ekaterina Pavlova, but refused to retract his words on the video — he said that he had invented the whole story "on a Friday evening in a state of alcoholic intoxication."

Read more in the exclusive Izvestia article:

Shadow glitch: Ex-prosecutor could influence court through stepson-juror