Russia prosecutors seek 3-year jail term for Pussy Riot

Prosecutors on Tuesday asked a Moscow court to lock up members of the Pussy Riot girl band for three years after they insulted President Vladimir Putin in a song, as Madonna made a plea for clemency. As the full hearings in the controversial trial went into a second week, the state prosecutor Alexander Nikiforov said the young women's crime was so severe they needed to be isolated from society. "This crime is severe and the prosecution considers that their correction is only possible in conditions of isolation from society and the punishment needed must be a real deprivation of freedom," Nikiforov told the court. On the eve of key presidential polls in March, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, Yekaterina Samutsevich and Maria Alyokhina barged into Christ the Saviour Cathedral and performed an anti-Putin "punk prayer" to protest his ultimately successful bid for a third Kremlin term. The three women, all in their 20s, were detained in March and charged with hooliganism motivated by religious hatred, a crime that carries a maximum penalty of seven years in jail. The prosecutor asked the court to find the women, two of whom have young children, "guilty of the crime and set them the following punishment: deprivation of freedom for three years and punishment in a penal colony of a general regime." The Pussy Riot trial has polarised the predominantly Orthodox country, with the prosecution arguing that the performance was intended to offend believers. The girl band's case has been taken up by celebrities including the pop star Sting, US rockers the Red Hot Chili Peppers before Madonna waded into the debate on her arrival in Moscow for a sell-out concert. The US pop diva said ahead of her concert Tuesday she hoped the band members would be allowed to walk away free, adding that a lengthy jail term would be a "tragedy." "I am against censorship and my whole career I always promoted freedom of expression, freedom of speech, so obviously I think what's happening to them is unfair...I hope they do not have to serve seven years in jail," Madonna told Western journalists in comments picked up by Russian media. "That would be a tragedy," she said in the comments late Monday. Her plea for clemency led supporters of the powerful Orthodox Church to call on the authorities to ban her scheduled concerts in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The lawyer for the Church plaintiffs, Larisa Pavlova, said she supported the punishment called for by the prosecutor. She said the performance was aimed at "desecrating the Orthodox faith," calling the women's protest a "bacchanalia, an ugly act." Pavlova said the video of the performance aimed to cause "maximum woe" and "included words addressing President Putin," adding the broadcast continued to insult "what is holy to millions of Orthodox believers." The band members themselves, she added, admitted the the name of the group "sounds very ugly in Russian." The country's most famous political prisoner Mikhail Khodorkovsky said it was painful to watch the trial casting a shadow over Russia. "The word 'trial' is applicable here only in the sense in which it was used by the Inquisitors of the Middle Ages," he said in a statement from his jail in the northern region of Karelia. Critics say the unusually harsh treatment of the female singers is part of a widening campaign against the nascent opposition to strongman Putin. Since beginning his third term at a lavish inauguration on May 7, Putin has all but dismantled any lingering legacy of his younger predecessor Dmitry Medvedev who had briefly raised hopes of a liberal transformation of Russia, critics say.