Breakdown of Суд решил освободить человека, которого полиция отправила в тюрьму.
человек
person
в
in / to (direction)
отправить
to send (perfective)
полиция
police
Questions & Answers about Суд решил освободить человека, которого полиция отправила в тюрьму.
Why is которого in the accusative case, and why does it look like the genitive?
The word которого acts as the direct object of the second clause: the police sent whom? Because it refers to человека (a masculine, animate noun), its accusative form takes the exact same shape as the genitive case.
Why do we use the perfective verbs решил and освободить here?
Both represent single, completed actions with a specific result. The court made a one-time decision (решил, rather than the imperfective решал) to perform a specific, completed release (освободить, rather than the imperfective освобождать).
Why is it в тюрьму (accusative) rather than в тюрьме (prepositional)?
The verb отправила (sent) implies motion toward a destination. In Russian, when you show direction or destination (answering "where to?"), you use в plus the accusative case. You would use the prepositional в тюрьме only to describe a static location, such as if he were already sitting in prison.
How could we rewrite this sentence to use после того как (after), since that is the focus of this lesson?
You could say: Суд решил освободить человека после того, как полиция отправила его в тюрьму. (The court decided to release the person after the police sent him to prison.) Notice that the relative pronoun которого (whom) is replaced by the regular pronoun его (him) in this new structure.