After years of first debating and then drafting its opinion, Israel’s Supreme Court is finally ready to issue a ruling on John Demjanjuk’s conviction and sentence to death for war crimes committed at the Treblinka death camp as the brutal “Ivan the Terrible.”
But the announcement of the court’s decision on the former Cleveland autoworker’s appeal has been delayed again, this time due to a strike by government workers.
According to the Israeli daily Hadashot, the Supreme Court’s opinion, said to be several hundred pages long, was to have been completed by the government printer this week. But the strike has delayed completion of the job.
Hadashot, in a lengthy report on the imminent ruling on the appeal, lodged five years ago, disclosed that an initial printing of the opinion failed to satisfy the court president, Justice Meir Shamgar, because of numerous printing errors.
The draft, produced by an unnamed private printing firm, was unacceptable and required a total revision, Hadashot wrote. Shamgar decided to turn over the job to the state printer, where it is now delayed because of the strike.
No firm date has been set for the announcement of the ruling. It had been expected in June or July, and is now likely to take place in August.
Shamgar has said he will give the news media at least two weeks’ notice prior to the date of the public announcement in order to enable local and foreign reporters to make adequate preparations.
That remark has set off speculation about what the ruling might be. Demjanjuk’s lawyer, Yoram Sheftel, insists he and his client are both optimistic.
DEMJANJUK SINGS ‘I’M GOING HOME’
Sheftel, who visits Demjanjuk in his jail cell each month, said he recently found the convicted war criminal happily singing the Hebrew song “Ani Hozer Habayta” (“I’m Going Home”) and tending the small garden he has grown outside his cell in the Ayalon prison.
In any event, Hadashot reported, legal observers in Israel are unanimous that the five-justice bench will send Demjanjuk to the gallows only if there is complete unanimity among the judges as to his guilt.
Demjanjuk was condemned to death by a three-judge panel of the Jerusalem District Court in April 1988, after being extradited from the United States.
He was found guilty of direct involvement in the deaths of some 800,000 inmates at Treblinka.
Several inmates who survived identified him as “Ivan the Terrible,” but his defense, both in the trial and on appeal, is that he is the victim of mistaken identity.
The defense received a boost when new evidence from the archives of the former Soviet Union was obtained following the conviction. It pointed to the possibility that another man, named Ivan Marchenko, may have been the “Ivan” of Treblinka.
Other evidence points to the possibility that Demjanjuk served at another death camp, Sobibor.
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