The Costs of Temptation

Insisting to the last that the whole ugly business was a frame-up engineered by disgruntled Czarist emigres, officials at the Soviet embassy in London came reluctantly to the conclusion that British justice could not be sidetracked. As Olympic Discus Thrower Nina Ponomareva doggedly practiced pushups for six weeks in an embassy bedroom, they maintained with stolid poker faces that in Russia no one is dragged to court until he is proved guilty. In Britain, the Foreign Office explained patiently, things are different: there it is considered the court's function to determine innocence or guilt.

Last week, aghast at this odd Western way of doing things, but helpless to combat it, the Russians permitted burly Nina to go to court to answer the charge of stealing five cheap hats from London's C. & A. Modes, Ltd. (TIME, Sept. 10). "I hope you won't put it against her," the shoplifting athlete's British counsel, Mervyn Griffith-Jones, told the court, "that she failed to surrender earlier." During the four hours of testimony that followed, Nina, wearing the same fawn-colored gabardine in which she was arrested, stoutly insisted that she had paid for the hats, although she could not remember getting a receipt. The C. & A. store detectives insisted just as stoutly that she had scooped them up under cover of a paper bag from another store. Citing this "remarkable conflict of evidence," Barrister Griffith-Jones put the question directly to Nina: "Did you steal any of those hats?" "Nyet," said Nina Ponomareva. But the court thought different. "Having considered all the evidence,' said Magistrate Clyde Wilson, "I must find the case proved ... I realize the fallibility of human nature. The hats displayed constitute a considerable temptation to many women. I think the interests of justice will be served if I discharge the prisoner absolutely* on payment of 3 guineas [$8.82] costs."

Smiling tentatively at first, Nina Ponomareva let her features relax in a broad grin when she realized at last that the judge's words meant she could go home. Two hours later she was aboard the Russian steamer Vyacheslav Molotov, bound for the happy land where everyone is guilty, guilty or not.

* In British law, "absolute discharge" is not considered to be a conviction, does not go into the police records as a crime case.

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