ustxtxb_obs_1987_10_23_50_00006-00000_000.pdf

Pho to by Bill Le issner A reminder of South Africa, on the UT campus sentencing procedure, that apartheid is immoral. “This understatement,” Tigar argued, “is a key to an error you made during the trial. Apartheid is not simply immoral. It is a system in which human beings are brutalized and subjugated because of their color. It is a criminal system that violates the most basic principles of international human rights and has been declared so by the international community. It is no less a crime than the genocide practiced by the Nazis.” Taylor, obviously angered by what she considered the students’ abuse of the county legal system \(five students public duty defenses and restricted the witnesses that students and their counsel could call on their behalf. Among the witnesses barred by Judge Taylor were state Senator Craig Washington; Dr. Thomas Di Gregori, a University of Houston professor of international economics; Dr. Harry Cleaver, a UT economics professor and expert on student activism; Dr. Francis Boyle, a University of North Carolina professor of international law; UT professor Tigar and Tembe Ntinga, the African National Congress cultural envoy to the United Nations. According to Tigar, the decision of guilt or innocence was “for a jury to make after hearing all relevant evidence.” But Taylor, he claimed, took it upon herself to undercut the student’s defense and restrict the witnesses that they could call. TAYLOR’S BEHAVIOR GETS curiouser and curiouser. After describing the students’ non-violent sit-in as a “terrorist-style tactic,” she went after County Attorney Ken Oden, describing as “utterly ridiculous” his recommenda tion of probation. “The people of this community ought to wonder whether their prosecutor is doing his duty . . . why does he bother to expend the effort and expense necessary to prosecute these cases and then ask the Court to consider a meaningless verdict?” \(“What Judge Taylor did was rant and rave from the bench at the end of a trial that she did not want to sit through,” Oden says. “It bothered her that they exercised their right to trial. And on the anniversary interpreted the history of the civil rights movement when she admonished the students that “this is not the way we address problems in our society.” “I wonder where she was during the ’60s?” defense attorney Schramm asked. \(As it turns out, Taylor was, in 1968, the managing editor of the University of Texas Daily Texan. Prior to that she had served as amusements editor and assistant issue news editor at the completely isolated. The university Faculty Senate voted 362 to condemn the sentences and urged the administration to take appropriate action to reduce them. One student whose case was tried in the court of Judge Guy Herman, one of Taylor’s colleagues, received deferred adjudication and was ordered to perform community service. Austin American Statesman editorial page writer Tom Barry and Editor Arnold Rosenfeld have both criticized Taylor’s sentencing and deportment. And groups from outside the university commuhity are organizing to raise the $7,000 to $10,000 required as a deposit on trial transcripts necessary for an appeal. Surely Judge Taylor has considered following her husband to Houston where she might resume the private practice of law. The peoples’ university, despite the intervention of state Senator Gonzalo Barrientos and the counsel of their own faculty senate has refused to turn down the heat on the student protesters. University President Cunningham continues to defend an investment policy that at $871.6 million makes the University of Texas the largest American public university still investing in apartheid. “None of the other universities that divested,” said Daniel Gohl, a 21-year-old graduate student in physics sentenced to five months in jail, “divested without pressure from student activists.” THERE IS AN IRONIC twist to this story of South African politics reverberating on an American campus. Just eleven days after the UT students occupied the university president’s office there was another demonstration. This one was of a different sort and it got less attention. It was 2:00 a.m. when five young men drove up Guadalupe Street in a Blazer jeep and stopped in front of the university’s West Mall. Four of them got out and the fifth drove away. After stopping at an automatic teller machine on the business side of Guadalupe, the UT students three freshmen and a sophomore crossed the street and moved across the mall to where a wooden shanty had been erected by a student group to stand as a silent symbol of poverty in South Africa. According to a UT police report, the four students went past the shanty and then began to run back toward it, whereupon they attacked the structure until it collapsed. At this point, a plainsclothes university police officer stepped forward and the students attempted to run. The officer pursued and ended up in a scuffle with two of the students before more police arrived, at which point all four were arrested and handcuffed. The original police report said the students had resisted arrest but no charges were filed on resisting arrest. Instead the students were treated like first offenders with misdemeanors are usually treated: County Attorney Ken Oden agreed to defer 6 OCTOBER 23, 1987