The Daily Oklahoman from Oklahoma City, Oklahoma • 83

THE DAILY OKLAHOMA! Tuesday, January 3, 1984 Big Losers Turn Givers Mr. Habeas Corpus: Seeking to Agitate World's Conscience CHICAGO "I'm better known in many parts of the earth than I am in my home city of Chicago," said Luis Kuttier, Mr. Habeas Corpus to the world. us Just rVflflrllin' On A of mallard ducks troops across the ju3i nuuumi vxji road, apparently unconcerned about an approaching car, on its way to a cove off the Mystic River at Mystic, Conn. Man's Clumsy Projects Threaten Unique Island HAMILTON, Ohio (AP) The county sheriff's new surveillance van was a present from a man who pleaded guilty to a drug charge, and the ment inside will be the gift of an admitted drug trafficker.

A county judge is letting drug defendants buy equipment for, the county instead of paying fines because any fines in drug cases automatically go to the state Pharmaceutical Board in Columbus. And Butler County Common Pleas Judge John R. Moser believes in keeping that money at home. Lawrence M. Denier, 23, of Fairfield, who had pleaded guilty to trafficking in drugs, was released by Moser from the Lebanon Correctional Institute after serving 60 days.

Moser had sentenced Denier to a year in jail and fined him $5,000. But the judge suspended the fine and the rest of the sentence and placed Denier on probation for three years after Denier agreed to pay $3,500 for surveillance equipment to put in a van owned by the Butler County sheriff's department. The van was purchased by Arthur Brown of Hamilton, who pleaded guilty to another' drug charge. Brown had accepted the court's offer of purchasing the vehicle in lieu of a $5,000 fine. The van was purchased for $3,500 and renovated.

The balance of a $5,000 check posted by Brown was returned to the defendant. Moser said the measure helps the county get needed equipment instead of sending the drug-fine money to Columbus. Most of the fines for other crimes go to the county general fund, Moser said. Moser noted, however, that the fine is not a substitute for prison. He pointed out that Denier, a first-time offender, had spent 60 days in prison.

"I hope that will be a deterrent," he said. Dentist Teils Of Mercury Mercury is as pervasive as the air we breathe, notes Dr. Hal Huggins, a Colorado Springs, dentist. Huggins, who has' investigated mercury for a decade, said mercury enters the air when coal and fuel oil are burned for heat or electric pow- Tln-acknlJ The wishes of unknown people in I nresnold or a Uream East Germany are expressed in this graffiti of a door and window on the Berlin Wall, which divides the city and separates friends and relatives from one another. The photo was taken last year at Bernauer Strasse in the French Sector.

Bland Campus Protests Diappointing Activists Washington University who chaired the Progressive Student Network convention, said that today students are forced by the economy to concentrate more on grades and job-seeking than on political activ- for magical tales of tides that galloped as fast as horses, and perilous fog banks, envelopes of mist so thick as to swallow up the forever. When the causeway was built in 1877, the Administration of Fine opposed the project, but it went ahead anyway. Thirty years later, the national Public Works Council decided to remove the causeway, but local resistance forced the plans to be shelved. Over the years, a breakwater was built into the bay at Roche-Torin to protect the farms at its shore, and the Couesnon was dammed to reclaim and preserve grazing land. In the language of state functionaries writing an interagency report, the engineers and architects evaluating the condition of in 1976 noted that "the site is one where numerous and occasionally contradictory interests run together." "The filling in process, a geological phenomenon, will not be halted by the steps man considers undertaking today," the study group wrote.

"But this consideration should not be an obstacle to a decision to change the course of events for a hundred or so years." The first project, started in July, involves removing the Roche-Torin breakwater over the next two years at a cost of about $2 million so that the See and Selune Rivers can fully wash the bay. When it is completed and additional money is found, the mouth of the Couesnon and its dam are to be modified so that the river may exert a stronger flushing action. A third step would Involve the construction of two reservoirlike basins that would serve to increase erosion and augment the flow of water. the mouth of the Couesnon River, one of three that no longer flush the bay effectively. The sandbar had not been there three months ago.

"That's developed after they started the project," she said. "It's a catastrophe, and God knows where we'll be in a year." Then the woman talked more quietly, as if she had some special, sensitive information. The real truth, she explained, was that Mont- would never be put right unless "they do something about the automobile dike, and there are interests that don't want any part of that." The dike, or causeway, stretches from the mainland to the island, providing access for cars. It is never fully submerged, even at high tides, and its construction in the 1870s, in the view of the late Yves Marie Froidevaux, chief architect of the national historical monument service, "deliberately broke the pact between the abbey and the sea." A vigorous campaigner to protect until his death this year, Froidevaux wrote that there had always been a struggle between conservationists wanting to protect the island "and the fear of lost visitors and profits." He said it was obvious that one of the steps necessary to save the site was destroying the causeway and limiting tourists to visits controlled, as in the Middle Ages, by the rhythm of the tides. The monastery on the island goes back to the 10th century, with the construction of Romanesque and Gothic churches dating between the 13th and 16th centuries.

Pilgrims visited in great numbers throughout the Middle Ages, and their voyages made Court of Human Rights in 1971, and won the case, although it took four years. Nearly 2,000 prisoners were released. "I persisted, I attacked," he explained, and that is a Kutner hallmark. He goes for public opinion and dramatic pleas as well as for legal rights, which is how he saved Tshombe from extradition and probable execution. But many a small man also has been helped by Kutner.

Leopold steered him to James Montgomery, a black maji sentenced to life for a rape he never committed. Kutner visited Montgomery in prison in 1947 and asked why he was there. Montgomery said simply, "You can see my color." The lawyer found that evidence had been suppressed in the case, and eventually won Montgomery's release. "I'm going to catch up on freedom," the grateful Montgomery told the lawyer, who never forget those words. Montgomery served nearly 26 years in prison.

Nor will Kutner forget a less grateful client, Ezra Pound, the renowned American poet who was confined to a mental hospital in Washington, D.C., after World War II. Pound broadcast for Mussolini, but one day in 1958 Ernest Hemingway asked Kutner if he could help Pound. Kutner and Abe For-tas, who later became a Supreme Court justice, won Pound's release. Pound asked them if they were Jewish, said Kutner. When they said yes, "he spat in our faces," Kutner recalled.

Kutner first developed the idea of "world habeas corpus" after visiting Germany shortly before Hitler took power. "That's where I grew up," he said. His hope is for a world tribunal to protect and assure the right of habeas corpus in all nations. Many eminent world leaders and legal scholars have endorsed his long fight, which is one of many projects that keep him busy. In his spare time he has been poet, painter, playwright.

Habeas corpus is the most basic human right, he says. Its principle is that governments may not hold prisoners without due cause, and it is a right that is widely accepted on paper. Many people, nonetheless, sit in jail on vague charges or none, and the abuses are worldwide, Anthony D'Amato, a former Broadway producer and now a law professor at Northwestern University in Ev-anston, 111., is executive director of World Habeas Carpus. He and Kutner share an interest in international law as well as a willingness to publicly take on the powers that be in battling for constitutional rights. Tneir concerns range from petsecuted Assyrians in lrat to illegally detained prisoners in the United States, and they arc adroit at putting on pressure where it hurts.

D'Amato in effect sprung Andrei Frolov from the Soviet Union by going for an Injunction In a Chicago court. The threat was that the Soviets might lose the benefits from the trading for Rraln and gold at the Chicago Board of Trade. "1 figured thoy wore fur more Interested In that than In the case of an individual," D'Amato said. He was right, and Frolov was freed to join his wife Lois In Chicago. France From the shore, this island looks like a dark pupil in the gray eye of the sea.

The tides, soft irises, contract toward the center, and then expand, with a rhythm, a pulse that seems without end. Gray water, beige water, opalescent water, miles of it, hundreds of millions of gallons of it, closes around the island, its abbey, its spires, and then, in hours, sluices back, draining the bay, filling the sea. The harmonies of movement, color and horizon are jeopardized now. French engineers have calculated that "man's brutality and clumsiness" has resulted in so much silt forming in the bay as to turn the island, its monastery and cathedral into a small granite outcropping on a doughy beach by 1991 ruining a site so exquisite that Unesco has classified it as a treasure of mankind. The tides, now reaching and surrounding the island and its monastery less and less frequently, would touch Mont-St.

-Michel only one time in 10 if nothing is done in the next eight years. Since midsummer, the French government has moved to deal with what engineers said was about to become an insoluble problem. They acknowledge that the silting cannot be entirely reversed, but engineers consider the first steps now under way a good start. Yet the remedies chosen so far avoid a number of decisions that bring conservation into potential conflict with the tourist business at One recent Saturday a middle-aged woman who sells souvenirs on the island, about 230 miles northwest of Paris, took a visitor to a window facing the mainland and a sandbar near Luis Kutner has been a human-rights lawyer for more than 50 years. He has sprung so many people from the crock that one of his nicknames is 'Springman'.

The late Illinois Sen. Paul Douglas called him "hell-raiser in behalf of the general public." Albert Einstein labeled him "humanitarian" and it wasn't just because Kutner negotiated a salary (a modest one of $6,000, actually) for Einstein in America. Kutner, like Einstein, has preferred to think globally. The shingle outside his law office at 105 W. Adams indicates his sweep: "World Court of Human Rights.

World Habeas Corpus Commission. International Due Process of Law. Whale Defense Center. World Court of Public Opinion. World Freedom Center.

International Public Relations Corporation." Habeas corpus, a writ seeking to bring a prisoner before a court to inquire whether he is held legally, is the key to much of Kutner's practice and so is public relations. He believes in suing, in getting into court and on record, in amending and appealing, and in stirring up public opinion. He was a novice lawyer, aged 22, when he made his first bundle by springing more than 100 men from Joliet prison with writs sent by mail. The man who tipped him off about wrongly accused inmates was his onetime friend from the University of Chicago, the thrill slayer Nathan Leopold, who was serving a life sentence. "I always kept in touch with him," said Kutner.

"He was the brightest man I ever met." Years later, Leopold himself was paroled and finished his life as a model ex-prisoner in Puerto Rico. Kutner's clients have been as famous as the Hungarian Cardinal Joseph Mindszenty, the deposed Congolese boss Moise Tshombe and the poet Ezra Pound. When MindsEenty was imprisoned on "treason" charges, Pope Pius XII retained Kutner, who won better prison conditions for the cardinal. Mindszenty later escaped. An ancient Spanish cross, given to Kutner by Pope Paul VI in 1965, is an outstanding memento of those days.

Kutner learned from a master maverick, Clarence Darrow, for whom he was once a law clerk. "If you're going to practice law," Darrow advised him, "you either have to be Toscani-ni or play in the fiddle section." That's what Kutner he also learned from Al Smith, for whom hf campaigned durint? Smith's losing presidential race of 1928. "So I decided not to play second fiddle," said Kutner, a handsome man In his mid-70s with a bearing both courtly and portly. His trimmed beard matches his mustache in elegance, but he grew the beard, he says, to cover the scars of a broken jaw inflicted by attackers in Northern Ireland. He was In Ireland to defend Internees held without bail or trial by the British under a special powers act.

Kutner, as master of habeas corpus, applied for a writ at the European the nuclear-arms buildup, contain enough coals of dissent to reig-nite a new fire of liberal campus activism? Are students becoming less self-absorbed and more politically involved? A week after the Oct. 24 invasion, some 200 student activists from around the country gathered at Kent State for a convention of the Progressive Student Network, a group of liberal student activists with an estimated 400 members nationwide, to evaluate these questions and to assess the mood of students today. Mike Pacifico, 31, a leading organizer of the convention, has lived on the Kent State campus (or 13 years. He was an undergraduate at the university in the early 1970s and still takes graduate courses there. Pacifico sees the very blandness of the Kent State reaction to the Grenada invasion as a telling commentary.

'The students going to school now have no idea what it's like to be involved in a war," he said in a telephone interview. "They are bred not to care. They are a totally different type of student body than was here 15 years ago. 'Back in the early 70s," Pacifico said, "we were cynical of anything the government said. Eut the other day, when I stood- outside talking to people about Grenada and they would U'll tah that there were 20,000 Cubnn troops on the inland, I couldn't believe they were buying this stuff.

They swallow everything the government dishes out, hook, line and sinker." A Columbia senior," Stuart Strickland, expressed similar disappointment with the tepid quality of recent protests at his school. "I'm tired of going to demonstrations where the major goal is to get a large number of people and then not do anything them," he said. "Wo go out there knowing no one will got arrested, knowing we'll all just return home safe and sound. It might as well not have happened." Kim Groves, 23, a graduate of George WASHINGTON Kent State University, Ohio, 1970: After President Nixon announces what he calls the incursion of American forces into Cambodia, 1,000 furious students protest, ignoring National Guard orders to disperse. Guardsmen open lire, killing four students.

Kent State, 1983: After President Reagan announces the invasion of Grenada, later described as a rescue mission by American forces, students organize a protest rally. Thirty people show up. The 1983 response at Kent State was typical of those on college campuses across the nation. The Grenada invasion sparked little, if any, reaction. The message was clear: Today's students care more about grades than about Grenada.

There were a few spirited exceptions to the generally docile student acceptance of the U.S. military action on the Caribbean island this year. Eut none compared with the angry, sometimes violent demonstrations of the Vietnam War era. At the University of California, Berkeley, nearly 2,000 students marched across campus and into the city Oct. 23, blocking traffic and breaking a window in a bank.

At Columbia University, whore campus activity was virtually halted in 1968 by students who occupied five buildings in protest of the university's civil rights policies, fewer than 300 students showed up for a Grenada protest rally. At the University of Iowa, some 40 students marched into Republican Rep. Cooper Evans' office in Iowa City and refused to leave until they spoke to the congressman personally. At the University of Massachusetts, students murched through the Amherst campus carrying banners of protest. Do these corn subdued demon-itrations, fueled by in-lignation over the Gre-ta'da invasion, the tombing deaths of 239 Marines in Lebanon and "Sure, there's a lot of students just looking out for No.

1. That's because they have to," Groves said. "In the '60s, a lot of student activists didn't worry about getting a job, because they knew they could get one." Others see it differently. Ralph Reed, executive director of the College Republicans, thinks the activists themselves have changed. Today's activists are returning to the more traditional values of a strong defense and strong family and Christian values, he said in an interview in his Washington office.

"The activists today are more conservative," Reed said. "They're proud of their country. They don't have that Vietnam hangover that their professors do. Go onto a campus today. Who are the shakers? Who are the movers? They'll be your head of the conservative newspaper or the director of the college Republicans." In fact, some of the more heated confrontations in recent demonstrations have been between liberal demonstrators and more conservative cnunterdemonstralr.ru.

The conservatives, not the liberals, have been arrested. At UC Berkeley, for example, It was 30 counterdemonstra-tors who were dragged away by police. On campuses such as UC Berkeley and the university of Wisconsin at Madison, two centers of student radicalism in the '60s, there Is a feeling that student activism will never bo what it once was. Leon Lnzaroff, city editor of the Daily Cardinal, campus newspaper at Madison, said: "The truth of the matter is that it's damned hard to be a liberal today." Hung Over? Don't Drive Among the other sources of ho mentioned are saltwater fish, contact lens solutions, certain cosmetics, reprocessed papers like toilet paper, broken thermometers, antiseptic washes, anti-inflammatory ointments and contraceptive gels and creams. He said up to 20 percent of the population may have "hypersensitive" reactions to mercury.

The American Dental Association lists the, following symptoms mercury poisoning: Tremors, convulsions, loss of appetite, depression, fatigue, irritability, moodiness, swollen glands and tongtie, ulcers in the a darkening ot gums known ao the "mercury tattoo," and birth Refects in offspring. In addition to recommending that hypersensitive individuals have their silver fillings replaced, Huggins maintains that "balancing body chemistry" with Vitamin and other, nutrients can help rid the body of mercury. over they were. Those who felt fine were just as likely to drive poorly ns those who felt terrible. Al Lauersdorf, administrator of Highway Safety Services of the National Safety Council in Chicago, questioned the applicability of findings from a test course to actual road conditions.

Dut he said he was "definitely not a skeptic" about the effects of a hangover on driving safety. The Swedish government it) taking the findings seriously, using brochures and full-page newspaper ads to promote the idea of not mixing hangovers and There's a new wist to the old saw about not driving if you drink: Don't drive if you are hung over. Hans Laurell and Jan Tornros, of Sweden's National Road and Traffic Institute, found that hangovers significantly reduce driving ability. The researchers threw a "party" and served 22 volunteers appetizers and dinner accompanied by beer, wine and punch. The volunteers slept in the lab, nnd after breakfast their driving ability was measured.

They drove on a closed course lined with two rows of pylons, Their ability to drive was based on the number of pylons they knocked over and their ability to jects scored worse when hung over than under normal conditions. While hung over, drivers experienced an average 20 percent reduction in driving ability. Impairment In driving lasted three hours after blood concentrations, as measured by breath analysis, reached zero. "The results give clear evidence ot the performance-degrading effects of alcoholic hangover," researchers said In their report, published in Friday's edition of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Subjects also wore unable to tell how hung driving..