Court Rejects New Demjanjuk Trial : Israel: Justices rule that it would violate right not to be tried twice on same charges. Despite acquittal, he remains in jail pending arguments for an appeal.

Israel’s Supreme Court rejected demands Wednesday that retired Ohio auto worker John Demjanjuk, acquitted last month of being the Nazi death camp guard “Ivan the Terrible,” be tried again on other war crimes charges.

But Justice Meir Shamgar, the court’s president, delayed freedom for Demjanjuk, 73, until at least Friday to allow time for appeals against Wednesday’s decision to a higher level of the court. Demjanjuk has been in an Israeli prison for more than seven years.

After studying nine petitions calling for Demjanjuk to be tried on new charges, three Supreme Court justices declared: “We have come to the conclusion . . . that there is no alternative but to reject all these petitions.”

The justices ruled that a new trial would violate his right not to be tried twice on the same charges--even though such a trial would be based on allegations not that Demjanjuk was “Ivan the Terrible” of the Treblinka death camp but that he had served in a Nazi unit at another death camp, Sobibor.

In last month’s acquittal, the court found strong evidence that Demjanjuk was at Sobibor.

After the decision was announced in the packed courtroom, there was a moment of stunned silence and then shouts of outrage.

“You bring shame on the Jewish people!” a woman shouted from the back of the courtroom as the session ended. “Shame on you!”

Yisrael Yehezkeli, whose family was killed at Sobibor in eastern Poland, tore his shirt as a sign of mourning and screamed in anger:

“I have little time left to live and swore to myself I would not let these murderers go! The court decided he was the murderer from Sobibor. How can they now let him go free?”

Attorneys for the nine petitioners, who included Yehezkeli and other survivors of the Holocaust, international Jewish organizations and an ultranationalist Israeli group, immediately asked Shamgar for time to appeal the ruling to a larger panel of justices. Shamgar said he will hear their arguments Friday.

Under court rules, Shamgar can appoint such a panel and give it 15 days to review Wednesday’s decision.

A new trial appears increasingly unlikely, however, in view of Demjanjuk’s acquittal on the Treblinka charges, the recommendation of the justices in that decision, including Shamgar, that the case against him be closed, the refusal of Atty. Gen. Yosef Harish to bring new charges and Wednesday’s decision confirming Harish’s stand.

“Each one of the three judges in his own way reached the same conclusion that there is no choice but to reject the petitions in this case,” commented one of the three, Justice Gabriel Bach. Sobibor had figured too prominently in the indictment, in the original trial and in the appeal, Bach said, to be revived.

Eight of Israel’s 14 Supreme Court justices have now declared that Demjanjuk should be released, and forming a five-judge panel to hear a new appeal may be difficult.

Yoram Sheftel, Demjanjuk’s attorney, objected to the further delay in freeing his client. The appeal against the latest decision will undoubtedly fail, he said, and the petitions have become frivolous.

Demjanjuk, who was not in court Wednesday, has maintained from the outset of the case that, from his capture as a 20-year-old private in the Soviet army in his native Ukraine in 1942 until virtually the end of World War II, he was a German prisoner and that he never served as a Nazi guard.

He was convicted in 1988 of “crimes against humanity” and sentenced to death after five survivors from Treblinka identified him as “Ivan the Terrible,” the sadistic guard who beat Jews as he pushed them into the gas chamber. After a lengthy appeal, the Israeli Supreme Court overturned that verdict in its ruling last month.

“Someone calls a person a Nazi, and his rights get thrown down the drain,” said Rep. James Traficant (D-Ohio), a supporter of Demjanjuk who came to Jerusalem this week in hopes of escorting him home to Cleveland. “You have to prove these allegations.”

Edward Nishnic, Demjanjuk’s son-in-law, welcomed the decision as a major step toward his father-in-law’s release. “We’re heading for the good ol’ U.S.A., and we will kiss the ground when we arrive,” Nishnic said.

Still, both the court and the prosecutors were giving Holocaust survivors an opportunity to pursue every legal remedy before they freed Demjanjuk.

“I am very sad,” said Dov Shilansky, a former Speaker of the Israeli Parliament who spent 17 months in Sobibor during World War II. “The court tried him, but did not bring him to justice. . . .

“How can he leave alive from the Jewish state that grew from the mourning of the children of the Shoah (the Holocaust)?”

Members of the ultra-rightist Kach movement, which had also petitioned for a new trial, angrily threatened to kill Demjanjuk in “revenge” if he is freed.

Baruch Marzel, a Kach leader, told reporters: “We will make justice for Demjanjuk ourselves. . . . If Demjanjuk is released, we will find a way to kill him, and in a short time, if not in Israel then somewhere else.”

Demjanjuk’s family, meanwhile, continued preparations to fly him home to Cleveland despite the Clinton Administration’s efforts to deny him re-entry to the United States.

Demjanjuk was stripped of his U.S. citizenship a decade ago after a federal court found that he had lied about his wartime activities; he was facing deportation when Israel extradited him in 1986 to stand trial as “Ivan the Terrible.”

The U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati has ordered the Administration to let Demjanjuk return so that he can appear for a review of the orders stripping him of his U.S. citizenship and extraditing him to Israel. The U.S. Justice Department is trying to have the court’s order overturned.

Traficant said, however, that he has assurances from the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv that, if Demjanjuk is freed and ordered deported, travel papers will be issued to let him enter the United States.

Times researcher Dianna M. Cahn in Jerusalem also reported for this story.

BACKGROUND: The Israeli Supreme Court

The Israeli Supreme Court now has 14 justices--12 permanent members and two judges drafted to help handle a heavy work load. The court hears appeals from district courts in criminal and civil cases and on issues involving Israel’s “basic laws,” the country’s equivalent of a constitution. Normally, the justices sit in panels of three or five, occasionally as many as seven or nine. Theoretically, 13 could hear an appeal on a major case. The justices also sit in panels of three as a High Court of Justice, with authority to hear and act on urgent petitions. Their decisions can be appealed to a larger panel of the Supreme Court. It was a five-judge panel of the Supreme Court that acquitted John Demjanjuk on his appeal from the Special District Court conviction and sentence. A three-judge panel, sitting as the High Court of Justice, on Wednesday denied the petitions by those wanting to try him again. The president of the Supreme Court will now decide whether that decision in turn may be appealed to the Supreme Court--a panel of five justices who so far have not ruled on any aspect of Demjanjuk’s case.