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"There wasn't a single session in November. The jurors began to get worried. It was fine for me, I'm a pensioner, I can spend as much time in court as you want. But about 80 per cent of the jurors had jobs," Yevgeniy Ivanovich explains.
This is what another juror, Vladimir Ivanovich, says: "Some of them had highly-paid jobs and wanted to keep them. They began to worry that if the trial was prolonged, they might get into trouble at work."
Nina Vasilyevna recalls being upset to hear at the final session that six members of the jury had asked to be excused. "We really wanted to hear the case through to the end. When I found out the jury was being dismissed, I wanted to phone the ones who'd pulled out. I wanted to try and talk them round, but I was told it was too late."
One juror, who asked for her name not be given, believes that not all of them asked to be excused of their own free will. "I think we were dismissed when it became clear that we didn't have a lot of faith in the prosecution."
Yevgeniy Ivanovich agrees: "We wouldn't have been able to convict. Why? Simply because the case against him was so badly put together that all of us - all 16 - couldn't believe that Pichugin was guilty. We just didn't get that impression. There was no proof against him. I think we were sent home because there wasn't enough evidence to obtain a conviction."
Nina Vasilyevna admits that although during her time in the courtroom she heard only the prosecution's side of the story and nothing from the defence or from Pichugin, she still formed a positive opinion of the accused.
She explains why: "The witnesses didn't provide any concrete evidence against him. Nothing in what they said pointed to Pichugin's involvement. It was all rather vague and roundabout. They'd seen him somewhere. They'd heard this or that. But none of them could say anything specific. It was all unconvincing, and I'm not the only one to think so. At the end of each session, or during breaks, we'd be in the jury room for a while and sometimes we'd ask each other: 'So what did that witness say? Nothing specific at all.'"
"I was amazed that the second jury convicted him," says another juror who declined to be named. "It's unlikely the prosecution dug up something new that we weren't told about. When we were sitting, the prosecution was just making it up. I remember the members of the gang being cross-examined. They couldn't say anything at all, and in general they didn't inspire much confidence. They were led into the courtroom in handcuffs. When we were discussing the case amongst ourselves, we weren't just wondering if he was guilty or not. The main thing was - what actually proved he was guilty."
The jurors probably did not suspect that someone might be interested in advance in their opinions, and they freely discussed their attitude towards the defendant in the jury room.
"After a while, one of us thought someone might be listening in on us in the jury room, so we shifted more of our discussions to outside," one juror recalls. "We weren't reading any reports on the case, or watching TV. In that sense we obeyed the judge, who was conducting the case in an entirely balanced manner. And it must have been hard for her, because it wasn't a pleasant case."
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