Once inside the courtroom, Yakovlev read his typed verdict without pausing to greet the court or look at the defendant.

The prosecutor was absent from court.

After declaring Okhotin guilty, he restated the parts of the customs agents’ testimonies that he deemed relevant. He cited Okhotin’s child as a reason for his doling out a conditional punishment instead of jail time.

Okhotin does not have a child, nor was one mentioned in the trial.

“That’s funny, actually,” David Okhotin, the defendant’s brother said. “It shows how attentive they are to details—how talented they are at creating their own stories.”

Andrew Okhotin also said he saw a man wearing a customs uniform go into Yakovlev’s chambers a few hours before the judge appeared to state his verdict.

Okhotin and his brother both expressed shock and disgust with the Russian justice system after the hearing.

“It’s in a pathetic state,” Okhotin said. “They try to be objective during the trials because of the monitoring. But how is the verdict reached?”

“One branch of the system covers for the other branch instead of fixing its mistakes,” David Okhotin said. “The saga goes on.”

Okhotin’s brother said once again that he believes Andrew’s Baptist faith in a country dominated by the Russian Orthodox Church motivated the judge to issue a guilty verdict.

“I think everything happened because the money was going to the believers,” David Okhotin said.

On the metro ride home from the courthouse, Okhotin mused about whether the construction on the Center for Government and International Studies, a block from his Cambridge apartment, would be completed before he got a chance to return to Harvard—should he choose to fight for his conviction to be overturned.

“If you know you’re innocent, leaving to me is like giving up,” Okhotin said.

—Staff writer Anne K. Kofol can be reached at kofol@fas.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Simon W. Vozick-Levinson can be reached at vozick@fas.harvard.edu.