From A Criminal Courtroom

Has this made "Law and Order" yet?

Mother Accused in Killing of Her Husband Is Pressed on Her Actions

and the highlights:

1.

The reason Mazoltuv Borukhova secretly taped a conversation with Mikhail Mallayev — the relative she is accused of hiring to kill her husband during a fierce custody battle — was to document a contract she signed to buy a house...When the prosecutor pointed out...that she could just as well have made a copy of the contract or had it notarized, she said only that making the tape “wasn’t the best idea.”

2.

The reason she and Mr. Mallayev, who lived in Atlanta, called each other 65 times in the six days before her husband was killed in October 2007, Dr. Borukhova, an internist, has testified, is that she had treated him and his wife for heart problems that month.

3.

The reason their electrocardiograph charts were dated August 2006 rather than October 2007, she testified, was that she had never set the time-stamp function on the heart monitoring machine.

But...she conceded that out of 10 charts of patients who underwent heart monitoring, the Mallayevs’ were the only ones lacking an accurate time stamp and the names of the patients.

4.

Mr. Leventhal accused Dr. Borukhova of making the custody transfer more traumatic for her daughter by allowing her to wail and scream for more than an hour and holding her legs as her father tried to take her, all as a cameraman she hired for $3,500 filmed the scene...“She was crying,” Dr. Borukhova said. “She wouldn’t let me put her down.”

5.

...asked why, after the 65 calls between her and Mr. Mallayev from the custody transfer on Oct. 22 until the killing on Oct. 28, there were then only two calls between them from Oct. 28 to Nov. 7 — the day that prosecutors say $20,000 was deposited into his Brooklyn account...[as] Dr. Borukhova had told them [the Mallayavs] to phone daily to report on Mrs. Mallayev’s blood pressure.

“Did she have some sort of a miraculous recovery?” Mr. Leventhal asked.

6.

She also testified that she could not recall the Mallayevs calling to offer condolences during the same period. “So many people were calling,” she said. “I’m not sure.”

Possible conclusion:

“She is ice heart,” Dr. Malakov’s father, Khaika — who, like Dr. Borukhova’s family, is a Russian-speaking Bukharian Jewish immigrant from Uzbekistan — said outside the courtroom in halting English. “She is professional liar.”