Briefs

>At Park Hills High in Fairborn, Ohio, 6-ft. 7-in. Mike Borden was the basketball team's high scorer and Most Valuable Player. Eager to continue his basketball career, Borden, 18, enrolled at Ohio University last fall and won the starting center position on the junior varsity. Then, last October, he was suddenly cut from the squad. The university had decided to adopt a recommendation of the American Medical Association that any player with only one of a pair of vital organs should be disqualified from contact sports. Thus Borden, who had lost one eye in a childhood accident, was out--or so it seemed until the American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit seeking his return to the team. Last week the U.S. District Court in Columbus told the university to put Borden back on the team. Said Judge Robert M. Duncan: "The public interest allies with allowing this man to live his own life."

> In March 1974, two men dragged Inez Garcia from her Soledad, Calif., apartment, and one of them raped her. That was what Mrs. Garcia later testified when she was tried for the murder of Miguel Jiminez, one of the alleged attackers. According to Garcia, less than an hour after the assault, she hunted down Jiminez and Luis Castillo. She shot Jiminez but Castillo got away. At the trial, she said defiantly: "I'm only sorry I missed Luis." Feminists made an issue of the case, which they hoped would establish a woman's right to retaliate violently against rape. But the prosecution contended that rape is not a justification for homicide. Moreover, the state argued that there had been no rape, that the killing followed a row over drugs. The jury found her guilty and Superior Court Judge Stanley Lawson sentenced her to five years' to life imprisonment. Now the California Court of Appeals has ordered a new trial, though the reason has nothing to do with women's rights. In instructing the jury, said the court, Judge Lawson erred by explaining the criteria for guilt in terms "strikingly comparable" to the less stringent ones used in civil cases. The state intends to appeal.

> "My friends began to steer clear of me after they found out what mom was," Jimmy Risher, 17, told a Dallas jury.

What Jimmy meant was that his mother, Mary Jo Risher, 38, is an avowed lesbian who was divorced in 1971 and now lives with another woman. Embarrassed by his mother's new housekeeping arrangement, Jimmy decided in 1974 to move in with his father, Douglas L.

Risher Jr., who had remarried. The father then went to court to gain custody of Jimmy's nine-year-old brother Richard. Risher's lawyer implored the jury not to make the youngster "a guinea pig in someone else's social experiment."

Mrs. Risher, a nurse, countered that her relationship did not interfere with raising her son. But the jury of ten men and two women, apparently moved by Jimmy's emotional plea to "get my brother out of this particular home," granted custody to the father. The verdict is a legal setback for gay-rights activists, who contend that homosexuality should not be considered an obstacle to being a good parent.

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