"Such big crimes have never come under amnesty before," he said to newsmen today after the sentence was read.
Moscow's Meshchansky district court sentenced Khodorkovsky to nine-year imprisonment for tax evasion and fraud involving huge sums.
The sentence may be mitigated after an appeal. Pligin does not rule out the prospect. It has been so on many judicial cases before, what with the many aboveboard outlets the Russian law provides to mollify a conviction.
"The sentence appears very harsh, considering contemporary legal practice," remarked the parliamentarian.
He warned against exaggerating the impact the Khodorkovsky sentence might have on the Russian capital investment climate.
"We ought not to paint too black the influence of this sentence on the global investment climate-there are a lot of other factors to have an impact on it," Pligin said.
"Khodorkovsky is a symbolic figure, and opinions differ-some take him positively, others negatively."
As for an alleged exemplary purport of this particular verdict, he thinks the category of exemplary meaning is to be ousted from judicial practice altogether. "A harsh sentence cannot have any exemplary effect," said the expert.
He insistently called to "analyze Russian developments of the 1990s so as to appoint limits of criminal liability" for instances rooted in that time of sweeping reform.
