They were released without charge. Former Pussy Riot band members Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were detained in Sochi, Russia on Tuesday, Feb. 18. That is the only thing to say," Tolokonnikova's husband, Pyotr Verzilov, said on leaving the court.Prosecutors had asked for three-year sentences, and Putin said he hoped the sentencing was not "too severe".The judge said in the verdict that the three band members "committed hooliganism driven by religious hatred" and offended religious believers.Before Friday's proceedings began, the defence lawyer Nikolai Polozov said the women "hope for an acquittal but they are ready to continue to fight".Maria Alyokhina, 24, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, 22, and Yekaterina Samutsevich, 29, were handed the sentence by a judge in Moscow amid a wave of protests around the world.Celebrities including Paul McCartney, Madonna and Björk have called for the women to be freed and protests timed for just before the verdict or soon afterward were planned in more than three dozen cities worldwide.
"If I had a choice to refuse (the amnesty), I would have, without a doubt,'' she said.They received support from luminaries ranging from Madonna to Yoko Ono to Burma icon Aung San Suu Kyi.Alyokhina was quietly whisked away from her prison colony in the city of Nizhny Novgorod while Tolokonnikova emerged in much more public fashion a few hours later from a prison hospital in Krasnoyarsk in Siberia.If offered to do it over again,"`we would sing the song to the end,'' she said. "Penal colonies and prisons are the face of the country,'' she said.The case also polarised Russian society, with Orthodox conservatives regularly getting into fights with Pussy Riot supporters during the trial, and even staging rallies of their own."I'm really happy that she is out,'' Samutsevich told Dozhd after Alyokhina's release.FREED Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova has slammed Russia's prison system and said that the whole country is built like a penal colony.Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova, whose sentences would have run out in early March, were granted the amnesty last week after parliament approved a Kremlin-backed bill.The stunt came just ahead of Mr Putin's re-election to the Kremlin in March 2012 and was aimed at denouncing the Orthodox Church's support of the Russian strongman during the campaign."Nadya is free!'' wrote her husband Pyotr Verzilov on Twitter.Their jailing turned them from little-known feminist punks who staged a handful of guerrilla performances in Moscow to the stars of a global cause celebre symbolising the repression of civil dissent under Mr Putin.She was whisked away from the prison without speaking with the media after the highly-anticipated release, her lawyer said.Alyokhina's release was marked by the same kind of security that marked that of Khodorkovsky, who was not seen after his release until he touched down at a Berlin airport on Friday afternoon. It also underlines the vast influence of the Russian Orthodox church. "But many are reaching their limits and waiting for the order to fight," she said of the growing movement against Putin.