The Strange Case of Johnny Harris

Moscow creates a new "civil rights" martyr

"Protests are mounting on the entire planet against the U.S. court's disgraceful sentencing of Johnny Harris on a fabricated charge," declared Tass. According to the Soviet news agency, a peasant from the South Russian region of Krasnodar described Harris' fate as "tantamount to a lynching!" As for the president of Outer Mongolian State University, he concluded that the Harris case proves American justice "is not worth a rap." From the frozen taiga of Siberian Yakutia came the informed opinion of Farm Worker I. Volkov that Harris' trial was "a gross violation of the Helsinki agreement." According to Oil Worker A. Pamuratov in Tashkent, Harris was convicted "solely because of his dark skin." In sum, concluded Tass last week, "the Soviet people resolutely demand a halt to the execution of Johnny Harris--a fighter for the civil rights of black Americans."

Johnny who? Even many civil rights activists in the U.S. would be puzzled by the Soviet press campaign on behalf of a "new Martin Luther King" who was on the verge of becoming a martyr of American racist injustice. A native of Birmingham, Harris, 32, seems an improbable choice as a hero. In 1974 he was serving five consecutive life sentences for robbery and rape.Then, during a riot at Fountain Correctional Center at Atmore, Ala., Harris killed a white guard by stabbing him 27 times with a homemade knife. At his 1975 trial, Harris was sentenced to death under a rarely used 1864 Alabama statute that mandates execution of a defendant found guilty of first-degree murder while serving a life sentence. Harris' lawyer has stated that the trial prosecutor would not have asked for the death penalty had the defendant been white or the guard black.* There is no evidence, however, that Harris, who was first convicted of burglary when he was 16, has ever been a fighter for civil or human rights. He was condemned to die in the electric chair on March 10, but a Mobile, Ala., district judge issued a last-minute 60-day stay of execution.

The timing of that scheduled execution helps explain the Soviets' sudden espousal of the Harris case. It coincided with the end of the Belgrade Conference on European Security and Cooperation on March 9. On that day, the U.S.S.R. managed to suppress any mention of human rights in the final document produced by the conferees, even though the 35-nation meeting had been called to review compliance with the 1975 Helsinki accords, including its human rights provisions. The Russians evidently seized on the case of Johnny Harris as a convenient riposte.

The Harris case diatribes becloud the Kremlin's stepped-up persecution of human rights activists in the U.S.S.R. The KGB's main target: small groups of dissidents who monitor Soviet compliance with the Helsinki agreements on human rights. In the past 14 months 22 members of these groups have been arrested. Among the most notable are Physicist Yuri Orlov and Writer Alexander Ginzburg. who are charged with "anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda." Computer Specialist Anatoli Shcharansky is accused of treason.

Grigori Goldshtein, 46, and Pyotr Vins, 21, members of Helsinki watch groups in Georgia and the Ukraine, have been sentenced to one year in concentration camps for "malicious evasion of socially useful labor." Leaders of a similar group in Kiev, Engineer Myroslav Marinovych, 28. and Historian Mykola Matusevych, 30, have been sentenced to seven years in jail plus five years of internal exile for "anti-Soviet agitation."

One irony of the Soviet press campaign on behalf of Harris is Moscow's professed horror that he faces the death penalty. In the Soviet Union, people found guilty of such crimes as bribery, graft and theft of state property are sometimes executed by firing squad. Last month, one A.G. Metlushko was sentenced to death in Byelorussia for a series of armed assaults -- crimes for which Johnny Harris got life.

* Amnesty International has also taken up Harris' cause because the London-based organization is opposed to capital punishment.

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