COLUMN ONE : A Death in Prague: Justice or Vengeance? : A sculptor who killed a skinhead has drawn strong support from a public outraged by rising crime in East Europe. He says it was self-defense. Prosecutors call him a vigilante.

Nowhere has the sense of lawlessness in the newly democratic countries of Eastern Europe presented a more troubling--and telling--spectacle than at Slavojova and Ciklova streets in the Czech capital.

It was at this intersection on a dank March night just after sundown that sculptor Pavel Opocensky stabbed to death a 17-year-old skinhead by piercing an artery in his chest. The fatal encounter came outside a tavern where the youth had been carousing with friends and provoking passersby.

The killing was four years ago. But the manslaughter conviction of Opocensky and a three-year prison sentence handed down by the court last month have transformed the unsettling case into a national obsession.

In a country fed up with the crime that freedom has fomented across the former East Bloc, the story of the sculptor and the skinhead is a tragic metaphor for popular disaffection with the unexpectedly chaotic ways of the free world.

Crime has trebled in the Czech Republic since the 1989 revolution, with burglaries, thefts and robberies leading the way. In neighboring Poland, 1,160 people were murdered last year, more than double the number in the final year of communism. Crime in post-Communist Romania is up 270%, in Bulgaria, 222%.

“How is it possible for a normal, decent guy to be punished for standing up to those teen-agers?” asked retired Prague physician Zdenek Basny. “We are not willing to accept that rising crime is the price we have to pay for freedom. The public is furious. We are locking doors that we never used to lock.”

But in the visceral rush to side with the sculptor, some of the murky circumstances surrounding the death of Ales Martinu have been hastily cast aside. Defenders of the skinhead complain that unquestioning public support for Opocensky has become a disquieting symbol of its own: A crime-weary public is so bent on revenge, so transfixed by its stereotypes of good and evil, that justice does not seem to matter.

“Yes, Ales was a skinhead, but he did not deserve to die,” said his father, Mirek. “When a life is taken by someone, he should be punished.”

Similar debates are under way in other Eastern European countries. A former Solidarity activist has been charged with murder for shooting to death a thief she feared was about to break into her Warsaw home. Prominent public figures have rallied to her defense, while prosecutors allege the killing was coldblooded murder.

An elderly man in western Poland last month stabbed to death two teen-agers who tried to rob him on the street. The man was hailed as a living legend, but he hanged himself in the hospital two weeks later when journalists began challenging his version of the events.

“My sin is so great, how can I live with it?” he reportedly said.

Opocensky says he killed Martinu in self-defense while doing what any decent person would have done in the circumstances: coming to the rescue of a pedestrian being roughed up by skinheads.

The burly 40-year-old had just returned to his homeland when the killing occurred March 25, 1991. He had arrived two weeks earlier from self-imposed exile in New York, where he had waited out the waning decade of communism after sneaking out of what was then Czechoslovakia on a falsified passport in the 1970s.

“I always dreamed of coming home,” said Opocensky, an imposing man with fiery eyes and a short fuse who served two months in jail but has been free pending appeal.

“But here I was, back home, and this horrible thing was confronting me,” he said. “I was shaking and trembling with fear and repulsion.”

The events that brought Opocensky and Martinu together that night are by and large not in contention.

Opocensky was on his way to meet friends for dinner when he came upon a large group of skinheads leaving a pub in his working-class neighborhood in eastern Prague. They were going to a rock concert, but some lingered in the street, singing songs and shouting racial epithets.

When two skinheads visiting from Austria began singing Nazi songs and shouting “Heil, Hitler!” the evening unraveled.

A pedestrian offended by the German songs got into a shouting match with the drunken skinheads. They began to rough him up, shoving and kicking. Another passerby tried to help, but he was sprayed with tear gas. When the second man dropped to the ground, his wife rushed to him.

It was then that Opocensky joined the fracas; accounts of the rest of the evening diverge dramatically.

“One of the skinheads lifted up a garbage can and started to run at her,” Opocensky said. “Her husband was choking and couldn’t see. It looked terrible what was happening to them. . . . I was convinced this skinhead was going to hit her with the garbage can. So before he could have done it, I ran against him. Then the other guys came to help him, so all the attention was on me. . . .

“It was like, ‘The skinheads are coming!’ And I remembered I had this pocketknife. . . . I said to myself, ‘No matter what, I will not let them hurt me. I am going to do something. I am going to take one of them with me.’

“I started to scream at them. ‘You fascists! I will kill you all, one by one or all together!’ You can imagine my situation with all of these skinheads around. There were three guys coming at me. Some say there were seven, but I only saw three. I am saying, ‘Come on!’ But at the same time I am backing off.

“When the first person jumped at me, I cut him with the knife. And that was it. It happened very quickly.”

The skinheads tell a different story. They acknowledge there was a fight, but they say that the woman was never threatened with a garbage can and that Opocensky unnecessarily escalated a minor incident into a deadly one. The woman reportedly told the court that she never saw a skinhead with a garbage can, a fact Opocensky attributes to his timely intervention.

Opocensky also says Martinu came after him with a steel pipe, but the skinheads and some residents of buildings overlooking the street said the youth was empty-handed and was backing away from the sculptor when he was stabbed.

“He jumped out and said, ‘Come on, you punks! I am used to bigger guys than you! You can’t scare me with tear gas!’ ” skinhead Jan Mrazek, who was standing next to Martinu when he was killed, said in a television documentary.

Opocensky says the witnesses were intimidated by the skinheads, while other witnesses who supported his version were given little credence by the court.

More than 8,000 people have signed petitions circulated by the artists union demanding that the case against the Communist-era dissident be dropped. Supporters insist that Opocensky--a signer of the Charter 77 human rights declaration--is a hero, not a criminal, for standing up to thugs even police have had difficulty controlling.

Czech legislators have proposed changes to the 1960s law on self-defense that ensnared Opocensky. President Vaclav Havel--also a former dissident and a Charter 77 founder--has promised to consider a pardon if the prison sentence is not thrown out on appeal.

Legal experts say the self-defense law is not unlike those in many Western countries, but has been narrowly interpreted by holdover judges from Communist times. Under communism, claims of self-defense were viewed suspiciously, particularly since the state held a monopoly on security and discouraged individual interference.

“The reaction to this case has been building from public frustration with all sorts of changes over the last five years,” said Ludvik Brunner, the first chief prosecutor in the Czech Republic after the collapse of communism. “After the disintegration of the former regime, we failed to teach society that democracy is not anarchy, but it is responsibility. Social tension is rising and people are afraid.”

Despite the popular mood, the former top prosecutor and other prominent lawyers and jurists have not joined the chorus of criticism over the verdict. Their voices have been muffled by the larger public outcry, but Brunner and the others say the facts of the case--albeit disputed in almost every detail--speak louder than popular sentiment.

Opocensky, for example, says he randomly slashed the youth by waving his pocketknife in the hope of scaring him and the others. But an autopsy report shows the wound was more than eight inches deep and inconsistent with the blade of the small knife Opocensky says he was carrying.

After the killing, Opocensky ran to a nearby police station for help, telling police that a band of skinheads were rioting. He did not tell them about the extent of his own involvement, and when police arrived, the street was virtually empty with no signs of a struggle. Aside from Martinu, no one was seriously injured.

When police and Opocensky entered the pub, customers blamed the sculptor for the turmoil. Opocensky then left town and did not turn over the disputed knife until a week later when he was arrested. He says he went into hiding, fearing for his life, but Martinu’s supporters say he wanted time to concoct an alibi and exchange a long-bladed knife for a smaller one.

“The version of the defense . . . was presented in such an unequivocal and convincing manner, that I myself believed it,” wrote prosecutor Marie Vodickova in a commentary in the Prague newspaper Rude Pravo. “Only later did I find out that the evidence casts grave doubts on it. . . . The public should know the second version.”

The dead youth’s family says Opocensky was not acting heroically or in his own defense. They say he provoked a youngster half his age and weight whose shaved head symbolized the country’s growing criminality but who never threatened anyone’s life.

Ales was a high school carpentry student and avid ice hockey player who first donned a leather bomber jacket six months before his death, his father said. The boy may have strayed from the straight and narrow, he conceded, but his shouting “Heil, Hitler!” and becoming embroiled in a drunken brawl did not entitle Opocensky to take Ales’ life, he said.

“Neither I nor my son ever killed anything, with the exception of a carp for Christmas dinner,” said Martinu. “We are not weak people, but we love life too much. . . . We tried to talk him out of joining the skins; we were so afraid something would happen to him. And here it was. He got into a conflict. But that doesn’t mean you try to kill the other guy.”

A panel of judges agreed in March, determining that there were two phases to Opocensky’s involvement. In the first, he tried to defend the pedestrians and, in the second, he killed Martinu. The threat posed in the first phase, they concluded, had passed before the second phase began. However, the court set the sentence below the five-year minimum recommended by law, an indication of its own ambivalence.

So far the public has been uninterested in legal explanations of Opocensky’s culpability. Residents have turned their wrath on authorities, criticizing police for doing too little about soaring violence and ridiculing a judicial system that would punish a man who dared to hold his own.

Violent crime in the country has jumped from fewer than 12,000 incidents in 1989 to more than 20,000 last year. The trend, seen across the East, is blamed on the newly visible gap between haves and have-nots, disrespect for underfunded and often incompetent police and a spiritual listlessness brought on by extraordinary social change.

“People admire (Opocensky) for being unlike themselves, for being willing to stand up to something wrong and evil,” said Dan Drapal, pastor of the Christian Fellowship Church in Prague. “But the lesson people are learning from the judiciary is that evil always wins. And because of it they will be less likely to help each other. That is very bad.”

Justice Minister Jiri Novak, who has been a primary target of public outrage over the conviction, has criticized the protests as a threat to the country’s newly independent judiciary. He has accused Opocensky and his supporters of attempting to influence the judges (there are no jury trials in the Czech Republic), an allegation that recalls Communist-era practices when court decisions were dictated by influential party officials.

“People see a man doing what the state should be doing to protect society, and then here comes the state and punishes him,” Novak said. “But what people don’t want to hear is that after Mr. Opocensky acted so courageously, he went on and extinguished a human life. The law allows you to defend against an attack, but it does not permit an act of revenge.”

Novak and others blame the media for making a celebrity of Opocensky and not reporting facts that raise doubts about his version. Vladimir Voracek, a former television journalist who recently took a job with the Justice Ministry, said his onetime colleagues have been at a disadvantage because of a news blackout on the case.

The original Opocensky trial in 1992 was open to the public, but because it attracted so much attention--including dozens of angry skinheads--the second trial last month was closed. Opocensky was found guilty in 1992 and given a suspended sentence. Both sides appealed, contending that the other side had intimidated potential witnesses, dissuading them from appearing in court.

The new trial attracted new witnesses, but because the proceedings were closed, journalists were unable to follow the testimony. Court files have been sealed pending an appeal to the Czech Supreme Court.

“Until two months ago, I was one of those people running around with a camera, and I can tell you I was strongly on the side of Mr. Opocensky,” said Voracek, who covered criminal and judicial issues for Czech TV. “It is easy to explain why. Mr. Opocensky is alive and giving interviews. Ales is dead.”

Opocensky acknowledges that he has a public relations advantage over his opponents, but he offers no apologies. His life has been turned upside down by the killing, he said. His marriage fell apart, and he still receives threats from skinheads.

His sculpting has also been affected. His latest monument, a tribute to author Karel Capek and artist Josef Capek, brothers prominent in pre-World War II Czechoslovakia, will be unveiled in Prague on Saturday.

But asked about his work, Opocensky stared solemnly at his short, thick fingers, capped with the ragged nails of a man who makes a living pounding heavy stones.

“It took me a long time to get over somehow the feeling that with these hands I killed somebody,” he said.