A district court in the Belarussian capital Minsk handed out the sentence to Andrei Sannikov after convicting him on charges of staging riots following December's presidential election.
Its provincial government has spent more than C$115m over the past decade on special teams of prosecutors and police and a fortified court, arresting 134 bikers and convicting most of them.
Just before the assassination, an Iranian court sentenced to death an Iranian-American former marine after convicting him of spying for the CIA.Adding to the jumpiness in Tehran and in Washington are warlike rumblings coming from Israel.
High-profile arrests are one thing: actually convicting a wrongdoer in a timely and transparent fashion quite another.
Despite mounds of evidence, convicting them will be agonisingly complicated.
Convicting Ms Tymoshenko for a gas deal done with Vladimir Putin, Russia's prime minister and future president, has an "anti-Russian undertone", said the foreign ministry.
"Now, if they sign the contract and get a reduction in sentence, but don't provide the information, we can and will take them back to court and remove the benefit".Here, too, inspiration comes from America, where the co-operation of gangsters-turned-witnesses has been the key to convicting mobsters.
Juries may feel more confident in convicting rapists if they can see a pattern in the kind of victim who gives evidence women with mental health problems, say, or people who had been drinking in a club shortly before an attack.
"I now favour a moratorium, because I have grave concerns about our state's shameful record of convicting innocent people and putting them on death row," he explained.Since it reinstated the death penalty in 1977, Illinois has exonerated more (13) of its inmates on death row than it has executed (12).
By convicting James McDougal, the president's Whitewater business partner, in 1996, he has come close, it is said, to being able to indict the president.
The British judicial system aggravates the problem, he says, because it is "so poor at protecting sensitive information and sensitive techniques, as a result of the ever-growing pressure on judges to disclose .The biggest obstacle to convicting the "core nominals" is the ban on the use of evidence acquired by tapping telephones, known as wiretap evidence, in British courts.
