Brooklyn District Attorney Eugene Gold said today he had sent appeals to Soviet authorities asking them to “undo the injustice” of the three-year sentence at hard labor given Vladimir Markman yesterday in a Sverdlovsk court for alleged “hooliganism” and other alleged crimes. Gold, vice-chairman of the Greater New York Conference on Soviet Jewry, called the sentence “an affront to all men of conscience, and the world must react vigorously.” He added that “the use of illegal process to punish those whose only crime is their desire to emigrate to Israel is a travesty of justice.”
Gold sent his request that the sentence be can-called in cables to Soviet Premier Kosygin, Chief Procurator Roman Rudenko and Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the United States.
Rudenko also was sent an appeal by Jacob D. Fuchsberg, past president of the American Trial Lawyers’ Association, who met Rudenko during a visit to the Soviet Union earlier this month, at the request of the Conference. Fuchsberg, in his cable, referred to Markman’s inability to get counsel of his choice. Fuchsberg urged Rudenko, as the chief legal officer of the Soviet Union, to “assume a special burden to assure fair treatment for Markman and for his troubled wife and child.” The American attorney said that if Rudenko failed to do so, “it will be difficult to resist a strong public opinion that Markman’s conviction and sentencing are a direct result of his desire to emigrate to Israel and to express himself as a free person on the issues related to that wish.”
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