The Justice Department has petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse a lower court ruling that charged prosecutors with fraud for withholding potentially exculpatory evidence in the case against alleged Nazi war criminal John Demjanjuk.
In a petition filed Tuesday, lawyers for the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations argued that the government had acted in good faith at Demjanjuk’s 1985 deportation trial before the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
In November of last year, the Cincinnati court overturned its own 1985 deportation order against Demjanjuk, charging that prosecutors had defrauded the court by deliberately withholding information that might have cast doubt on Demjanjuk’s identity.
If the fraud charges are now overturned by the Supreme Court, the government may stand a better chance of deporting the retired Cleveland autoworker a second time.
In 1986, following the appeals court deportation ruling, Demjanjuk was extradited to Israel where he was convicted and sentenced to death for wartime crimes at the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland.
But in 1993, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned the conviction, ruling that there was insufficient evidence to prove that Demjanjuk was the notorious “Ivan the Terrible” who committed the Treblinka crimes.
While Demjanjuk, having been stripped of his U.S. citizenship, searched for a country that would accept him, the Cincinnati appeals court ruled that Demjanjuk should be allowed back in the United States.
RULING REVERSED BECAUSE OF FRAUD
Once he returned, the court reversed its earlier deportation ruling on the grounds of prosecutorial fraud.
But while ruling that Demjanjuk may not be Ivan the Terrible, the Israeli Supreme Court found compelling evidence that the retired Cleveland auto worker served as an SS guard at other concentration camps.
Prosecutors, who are now pressing a Cleveland district court to reaffirm its 1981 denaturalization order, hope to show that Demjanjuk was stripped of his citizenship and deported not only for his crimes in Treblinka, but for his activities in the other camps, as well.
They hope a reversal of the fraud charges from the Supreme Court will vindicate the prosecution and help push forward the denaturalization proceedings.
“If left undisturbed, there is a significant likelihood that the (fraud charges) will hinder the government’s efforts to remove (Demjanjuk) from the United States,” Solicitor General Drew Days wrote in the petition to the Supreme Court.
The government argued that prosecutors involved in the deportation proceedings were found to have acted in good faith.
The failure to produce certain documents did not rise to the level of “egregious and deliberate misconduct, such as bribery of a judge or fabrication of evidence” that is typically found to constitute fraud on the court.
Jewish groups lauded efforts to appeal the fraud ruling to the Supreme Court.
“We wholeheartedly support the Justice Department’s position that the government prosecutors acted in good faith and did not intentionally withhold information from Demjanjuk and the court therefore did not have authority to void its extradition order,” ADL National Chairman Melvin Salberg said in a statement.
Jewish groups had also been angered by the appeals court’s refusal to adopt the conclusions of an independent judge that the court assigned to investigate the fraud charges in June 1992.
The court had appointed U.S. District Judge Thomas Wiseman Jr. of Nashville to serve as special master to oversee the investigation into the OSI’s actions.
The special master later concluded that the Justice Department had not committed fraud in the case.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
