In Odessa, the court sentenced the thieves to read the story of Mark Twain

The Malinovsky District Court of Odessa sentenced two people who stole car radios to one year of suspended imprisonment. The court also ordered them to read several works of literature that foster humanism and respect for private property, it says in a document from the base of judicial acts.

As follows from the materials of the case, the suspects, who turned 23 and 19 years old, entered the parking lot and stole a radio, three speakers and a gear lever from a VAZ car. They also stole a car radio from the Volga car.

The defendants were threatened with three years in prison, but they were given a suspended year with additional duties.

When considering the case, Judge Alexander Garsky drew attention to the personality of the defendants, who turned out to be people with “very limited development and education.” They “lack understanding of property relations, relations between people,” the court decided. The accused “do not understand universal human values, including those that are laid down by parents in childhood.” To fill this gap, the court decided to sentence the defendants to reading books.

In particular, convicts need to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, White Fang by Jack London and the verse “Passing days, passing nights” (“Days are passing, nights are passing”) by Taras Shevchenko.

In the reasoning part of the decision, the court indicated that “in the opinion of Fyodor Dostoevsky, to stop reading books means to stop thinking.” “Reading the works determined by the court will become an incentive for the accused to think and understand the world,” the court stressed.

When making the decision, the court took into account that the accused had not been previously convicted, one of them has a wife and a child. The defendants also admitted their guilt and cooperated with the investigation. They said that they went to theft due to lack of money. They were needed to buy a ticket to Belgorod-Dnestrovsky, where one of the defendants was given housing as an orphan. He worked at a construction site in Odessa for 500 hryvnia a week. But the orphan did not even receive this money: the foreman spent his salary on renting a living space.

In passing the verdict, Judge Garsky was guided by the statement of the lawyer Anatoly Koni: “The court, in a certain sense, is a school for the people, from which, in addition to respect for the law, lessons should be learned of serving the truth and respect for human dignity.”