“My personal opinion of the judge is that he’s tough but he’s probably fair,” he said. “He’s not a sweetie-pie, but he’s tough to both sides.”

Okhotin said he found the prosecutors’ line of questioning unresponsive to his testimony.

“I thought that the other side had to falsify events in order to prove their case,” he said. “That tells me they were not right in what they did. Morally, I felt some vindication that I can tell my story.”

Bracing for the Unknown

In the two months after his trial date was announced on June 16, Okhotin said he made what preparations he could for Wednesday’s trial.

Extensive meetings with his two Russian attorneys in those weeks did not produce elaborate defense strategies. Instead, Okhotin said, they revolved around “trying to remember all the details accurately” regarding that day in March.

Okhotin said his lawyers had found it “encouraging” that all his statements about the confiscated money, from his first remarks under interrogation to his most recent claims, had remained consistent.

Present at one of the pretrial meetings was Smith Professor of Law Henry J. Steiner, who knew Okhotin from his time studying at Harvard this year.

A tourist trip to Russia with his wife turned into a stint as legal consultant to Okhotin, Steiner said. Pivotal to this new role was an hour-long meeting in which he said he helped Okhotin and his lawyers diagnose weaknesses in the prosecution’s case.

And in a new twist to the letter-writing campaign which Okhotin and Sonnenberg had initiated earlier this summer—including letters from congressional representatives and Harvard administrators, directed at officials in the U.S. and Russian governments—the lawyers suggested that Steiner write a letter to the chief judge in Okhotin’s case, vouching for the character of the defendant who studied human rights law under him at Harvard.

Steiner said the letter, translated into Russian, attested to Okhotin’s “quality of mind” and “quality of person.”

Sonnenberg said Dunphy Professor of the Practice in Religion David Little, with whom Okhotin studied closely at HDS, had written a similar letter.

As a result of these letters and others—some of which Okhotin said came from Harvard Law School students—Steiner said before the trial that Okhotin had “some very sturdy testimony behind him.”

“Much of the case turns on credibility, whom they believe,” he said—and he added that letters of recommendation could go a long way in winning that credibility in the judges’ eyes.

Back in Cambridge, HDS spokesperson Wendy McDowell said HDS Dean William A. Graham and HDS Assistant Dean for Student Life Belva B. Jordan were still waiting for any official Russian response to the letters of appeal that they sent in July.