CAPITOL COMMENTS

An Outrageous Charge in Athens

By Richard G. Zimmerman

Plain Dealer Columbus Bureau

COLUMBUS-Imagine a tense game at the Stadium: The Indians are trailing by one run. There are two outs in the bottom of the ninth. The Indians have two men on base, but the count is three balls, two strikes on the pinchhitter at bat.

The pitcher winds up and hurls a low, inside curve.

"Strike three!" calls the umpire.

"You bum, you blind man, you stinking robber." cries Yonnie Polaski, an avid Indian fan.

RICHARD G.

"Would you mind putting ZIMMERMAN your opinion of the umpire in writing?" a police man standing behind Yonnie asks.

"Not at all." replies Yonnie, as he writes out his epithets in long hand and hands them to the policeman.

"SIR, YOU ARE under arrest under the criminal libel law of Ohio," the policeman informs poor Yonnie.

"I happen to know that umpire," the policeman continues. “He is my friend. He is not a bum, he is not blind and he is not a robber. The epithets are not aimed at accomplishing any moral end-they are makicious comments.”

Yonnie is tried and found guilty. He serves the next five years of his life behind bars for exercising that great American privilege of disparaging the umpire.

This, course, is an exaggerated tale. It would never happen in the United States. But are you so sure it could not happen if the umpire happened to be, instead, an oversensitive, influential government official?

Last week, in Athens. O., a 20-year-old former Ohio University coed was hauled before the bar of justice in Athens County, charged with breaking Ohio's seldom-invoked law of criminal libel.

She was charged with passing out a mimeographed leaflet which described a local judge and a local police officer as being a part of the "thug-racist establishment.”

No matter what the final disposition of the case may be: the fact remains that police were able to arrest and jail for almost a week a young coed on such an outrageous charge.

FEW WOULD uphold the right of a citizen to make specific and untrue charges against specific office holders. To charge inaccurately that a government official is an active Communist. a member of the KKK. a homosexual, a wife swapper, a bank robber or a perjurer is reprehensible.

But to typify public officials as log rollers. pork barrelers political hacks, ninnies and gutlessly expedient politicians is a citizen's time-honored right, and anyone who goes into public life and expects not to be called such names is worse than naive-he is a ninny.

YET IN ATHENS, O., a bully of a police sergeant was able to haul into court a coed on the charge of passing out literature calling members of the local establishment racists and thugs. Meanwhile, articles from far right-wing publications suggesting that certain of our national leaders are traitors are freely read and circulated.

Outlandish? Ah, yes. But I know a German-born university professor who remembers when every thinking German thought that little man with the black mustache was pretty outlandish, too.

L