TO BE ACCUSED

IS TO BE GUILTY:

3. Casual Death Sentence

"Mike" stood before me, oppressed with the weight of defeat. This former Lieutenant of Free Poland, crushed, not so much by the unfortunate circumstance of his arrest, but by the vicious distortion of fact voiced by the perjured testimony of the arresting officer.

I shall never forget the pathetic note of disbelief in his voice as he asked me "But Mr. Mortenson, of this I am not guilty. How can the policeman, whom we should respect, say such things to the jury when he knows I did not do them?"

I assured him that in this land of justice and equality there are some people who care about fair trials. I felt profoundly ashamed to admit that the citizenry as a whole knew little and cared less about certain police methods. I found it almost impossible to explain that the Vice Squad detail of our law enforcement body resorted to unscrupulous methods of deliberate entrapment. That these men, whose sense of morality and truthfulness may have never existed, or at best, has undergone changes of expediency, do flourish in our city and do present under sacred oath such fabrications, distortion, and willful lies, that were they not officers of the law, they would be confined to mental institutions.

This man, whose heroic efforts during the war, in the service of the free world are internationally recognized and whose desire was to live a decent, useful life, was now faced with a sentence for a crime he did not commit. He would now be automatically deported under the McCarran-Walter Act simply because a vice cop so falsified his testimony as to leave an incredulous jury no choice but conviction. Deportation to his country would have meant execution at the hands of the present government.

His case was brought to my attention literally at the eleventh hour on Feb. 27. On Monday, March 2 he was to return for sentence. Obviously there

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