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Comment by mcsoft | Hacker News Reader

This guy's father worked for Russian government space agency, trained to be a cosmonaut. Now he's in the court watching the same government prosecute his son for political youtube videos. It is a disturbing sign when authorities press baseless charges against children of people who served their country their whole life.

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"It is a disturbing sign when authorities press baseless charges against children of people who served their country their whole life."

The baseless charges are disturbing but if they have done something wrong it's also disturbing to NOT press charges against children of people who served their country their whole life. Which happens quite a bit.

I had followed this case closely. Initially they accused a boy with directing crowds during Moscow protests on July 27, there was a video evidence. He was arrested and put into jail. Meanwhile prosecutors admitted that the guy on the video is not him. They let him go, he spent over a month in jail for no reason. They dropped initial charges but instead of begging his pardon, they brought totally different, unrelated charges of his blog content being extremist. While I agree your statement in general, in this particular case it all looks very thin and biased.

There’s a long history of russia executing and jailing it’s heroes.

Yes. The same could be said of many other societies, monarchies and liberal “democracies” as well though.

>It is a disturbing sign when authorities press baseless charges against children of people who served their country their whole life.

Don't get me wrong, tribalism happens in all systems (e.g. if you're immediate family of a local cop it's often a free pass to DUI in many parts of the US) but not prosecuting because his dad was "one of us" is even worse than prosecuting in the first place.

If they're gonna be tyrannical I'd at least like to see them be consistent rather than give people with ties to the state a free pass as happens in so many cases.

Neither virtue nor guilt is hereditary. I feel like we're losing touch with this fundamental principle of fairness.

> is a disturbing sign when authorities press baseless charges against children of people who served their country their whole life.

As opposed to baseless charges against an ordinary citizen being ok?

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