The trial of Pussy Riot, which opened in Moscow, on July 30th, and is expected to conclude with a verdict on Wednesday, has been an outrageous, astonishing, biased, exhausting, ridiculous, and at times comic spectacle. But at the end of the day it boils down to an unapologetic demonstration of force by the state. The three women, members of a punk-rock band who fell victim of the state’s repressive machine, showed, in contrast, spiritual and moral strength.

The young women of Pussy Riot are being tried for “hooliganism” and inciting “religious hatred,” on the basis of a “punk prayer” they performed in Moscow’s Christ the Savior cathedral. For this performance, called “Our Lady, Chase Putin Out!” the prosecutor on Tuesday demanded three years in a labor camp for each defendant.

The women insist that their act was artistic and political in nature—and, indeed, politics is why they are being prosecuted, as part of a broader crackdown by Vladimir Putin’s government. Throughout the trial, though, the judge, Marina Syrova, consistently removed or ignored any mention of politics. In a characteristic exchange, one of Pussy Riot’s lawyers asked one of the “injured parties,” “Was Putin’s name pronounced in the cathedral?”; the judge responded, “Question dismissed.” Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, one of the three women, said in written statement that the main point of the performance was “a protest against illegitimate elections and Patriarch Kirill’s endorsement of President Putin.” “I thought the church loves all its children, but it appears that the church only loves those who vote for Putin,” wrote another band member, Maria Alekhina, in hers. Both statements, along with one from the third woman, Yekaterina Samutsevich, were read by a defense lawyer, and ignored by the judge.

Instead of politics or art, the prosecution, with full compliance of the judge, was fully focussed on the pretense that the issues were ones of faith, God, the church, believers’ offended feelings—even the devil.

Every injured party and witness—church security guards, a candle keeper, a cleaner, a treasurer—began by pledging that he or she was a pious believer, observing religious holidays and fasting periods. Apparently, their testimony was needed to confirm the indictment’s message that the performance was an insult to all Orthodox believers. In fact, there are many Orthodox Christians among those who have ardently protested the trial, but the judge made sure the faith of defense witnesses was not identified. “Are you a believer?” a defense lawyer asked Alekhina’s teacher, who spoke fondly of her student. “Question dismissed,” snapped Judge Syrova. She declined to hear nearly all defense witnesses: out of seventeen people the defense called only three were allowed to testify.

The injured parties, one after another, spoke about being profoundly offended by the Pussy Riot’s performance (which one called their “devil’s pranks”); by the colors of their dresses (too loud, inappropriate in a church); by their appearance in the cathedral bare-armed; by the way they crossed themselves (it looked, a witness said, like a parody of crossing). They raised their legs too high—“so everything below waist is showing.” “By their act, they basically spat in my face, in my soul, in my Lord’s soul,” the candle-keeper said and added that she cries each time she remembers seeing Pussy Riot in the cathedral.

And yet it is not even clear what the witnesses actually saw: the performance was in an almost empty cathedral (the Pussy Riot women chose the time when there was no service) and lasted barely thirty or forty seconds before the women were driven out. “I hadn’t understood the words, thank God,” one of the injured parties said. How could the witnesses recognize the women, who had performed in balaclavas? One of them says she knew Alekhina “by her calf muscles.”

One of the prosecution witnesses hasn’t even been in the cathedral. He is, as it were, a “witness of the clip”—that is, he saw footage used in a YouTube video produced later, which was cited indiscriminately in the hearings. The crucial question of who produced the clip, when or where, remained unexamined. The witness talked about “hell being as real as Moscow metro,” and said the women came to the church to declare “war on God.” He said that watching the clip was painful, but that he watched it over and over again. Nobody asked what this apparently masochistic desire had to do with the criminal charges.

Throughout, there was a rotating cast of guard dogs in the courtroom, lest the three women try to run away from the glass “aquarium” in which they are locked during the trial. Last Thursday, it was a German shepherd, lying on its back, paws up, its handler scratching its belly. On Friday, it was a Rottweiler, aggressive and barking. “Remove the dog—we can’t hear anything,” one of the defense lawyers asked. “He’s barking because you speak too loudly,” the handler retorted.

The courtroom is too small, and the audience is limited to the women’s families and the press—and there are more of both than there is room for. Those who try to get in are held back by gun-carrying men in black—court marshals and special police. On Friday, a group of journalists wrote a letter saying that they were “humiliated, kept on the stairs for hours, barred even from the floor where the sessions are held; [the journalists] are pushed, yelled at, physically driven out from the courtroom.” The letter added that the court marshals had threatened to set the dogs on reporters.

“I have no rights in this court,” a defense lawyer said, exasperated. The judge responded: “Indeed, all you have is obligations.” It is not clear whether this is a bad joke. Verbal fights, bad-neighbors’ style, erupt all the time, between the lawyers’ teams, as well as between the defense lawyers and the judge. By day six of the trial, the defense has petitioned seven times that the judge be recused. According to the court’s rules, it’s the judge’s own prerogative to decide whether she should be removed or not. Each time, Syrova consulted herself and, after some deliberation, declined the motion.

Most of the trial’s sessions lasted for ten or eleven hours. On Friday, a policeman on guard outside the courthouse passed out. The Pussy Riot band members, all three of them in their twenties, would be brought back to jail at close to midnight, then woken up in the small hours to be delivered to the courthouse in time for the early-morning session. According to people with knowledge of jailhouse procedure, before they are put in the vehicle that delivers them to the hearings, prisoners are kept doubled-up in “glasses,” waiting spaces about a square metre large. All through the trip, and until they are locked in the courtroom’s “aquarium,” each young woman was handcuffed to the wrist of a female warden.

The accused and the lawyers complained of exhaustion and of feeling unwell. Ambulances were called. “Doctors tell me you are so fit you can do the catwalk,” the judge told a female lawyer, a stout woman in her forties. “This is beastly!” one of the lawyers said. And “beastly” is an appropriate word to describe the relentless marathon of the hearings. Every now and then the mutual annoyance of the defense lawyers and the judge gets so high that they yell at each other at the top of their voices.