Amy Knight, a longtime Russia reporter and author, has a very great blog posting over at the New York Review of Books on the death of lawyer Sergei Magnitsky.

In early December, amid growing public outcry over Magnitsky’s death, President Dmitry Medvedev fired twenty senior officials in the Federal Prison Service, including the chief of Butyrka prison and the Moscow prisons chief, and ordered the Ministry of Justice, which oversees prisons, to investigate the case. On December 29, a day after the Public Commission’s report came out, Medvedev went higher up the ladder, dismissing the deputy chief of the Federal Prison Service, Lt. Gen. Aleksandr Piskunov. In a separate decree Medvedev made it illegal to hold persons accused of tax and other financial crimes in pre-trial detention. This was an important step because those who are wrongly charged with financial malfeasance–a common occurrence when powerful people want to get rid of enemies–can languish in prison for a year, or even longer, if the court consents, without a trial.