“Mikheil Kavelashvili has begun his tenure with one of the most humane, correct decisions that have made many families happy,” stated parliamentary majority leader Mamuka Mdinaradze, commenting on the President’s pardon of 613 convicted persons on the occasion of Epiphany.

According to Mdinaradze, not only the President’s administration but the entire system was involved in the process.

“I know very well how this process proceeded. Not only the President and his administration were involved, but the entire system, especially the Ministry of Justice’s penitentiary institution. The penitentiary’s characterization and recommendation regarding how specific convicts behaved and to what extent resocialization goals were achieved were of utmost importance.

In general, we should remember that a sentence has preventive purposes in two directions, one private and one general: how well a person is resocialized and how a particular punishment affects society from a preventive perspective. When society is not against this, makes correct conclusions, has correct perceptions, and when it cannot negatively affect a person but rather will be encouraging for them to improve and not commit crimes after release in the future, naturally, in this case, both private and public general preventive goals are fulfilled and the most relevant decision is to release the convict.

People took to social networks asking how the President managed to review 613 cases. Do you think the President should sit down and review each case in detail? What is his administration and all the people working there doing? What are the numerous employees of the penitentiary institution, Ministry of Justice, and other relevant agencies, who review risks and have their positions recorded regarding each of them, doing?

The whole system works on this. This system, headed in this case by the President’s administration, familiarizes itself with details and makes individual recommendations to the President regarding each convict for pardoning. This is the specificity of pardoning. I know the list was much larger, but considering preventive risks, this list was reduced. I also have information that work in this direction will continue, though it may not be in the near term – pardons cannot happen every second or third week.

Great thanks to Mikheil Kavelashvili. We have declared that our goal is proper execution of punishment from a preventive perspective and reducing the number of prisoners to maximally approach the European average standard,” stated Mamuka Mdinaradze.

When asked whether the pardons have any political purpose, Mdinaradze noted:

“Mikheil Kavelashvili is the first president in recent times who pardoned convicts based on objective circumstances. In all previous cases – during Salome Zourabichvili’s, Margvelashvili’s, and Saakashvili’s times it was a subject of political or other types of trading, and I’m not saying this accidentally. When they criticize some people, let them remember how Salome Zourabichvili pardoned, for example, the killer of a 22-year-old policeman. Today Kavelashvili is being criticized by people who didn’t say a word about it then. For example, she pardoned someone who threw a Molotov cocktail at a police officer and a person who stabbed his own father and declared them heroes. Other types of pardons concealed huge suspicions behind them. Of course, proving this through criminal law procedures is extremely difficult. However, we understand well that when you pardon the killer of a 22-year-old policeman, the pardon can’t be implemented without certain corruption, be it political or another type of corruption. What other motivation could there possibly be in this? They should think carefully about what they’re criticizing and aren’t speaking up about.

When an objective decision comes out and someone looks at it from a state perspective, they see something bad in everything. I’m surprised they haven’t called it a Russian pardon yet, maybe you’ll think of that too. Since they oppose everything done for Georgia and the state with lack of arguments.”