Contact:  Rick Peterson, Manager of News Services, 414/832-6590
For Immediate Release						May 19, 1997

Championing Convicted Criminals Focus of Lawrence University Lecture 


	APPLETON, WIS.-- High-profile interventions by prominent writers,
journalists and celebrities on behalf of famous criminals they believed were
unjustly convicted or deserving of early parole will be discussed Wednesday,
May 28 in a Lawrence University Main Hall Forum.  

	Gary Rosenshield, professor of Slavic Languages at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, presents, "Crime and Redemption, Russian and American Style:
Dostoevsky, Buckley, Mailer, Styron and Their Wards," at 4:15 p.m. in Main
Hall, Room 109.  The event is free and open to the public.

	Rosenshield will focus on the similar motivations and risks involved in
four specific cases:  19th-century Russian author Dostoevsky's intercession for
Ekaterina Kornilova, a stepmother who threw her step-daughter out of a
fourth-story window, as well as the more recent interventions by American
writers William F. Buckley, who defended Edgar Smith, Norman Mailer, who
supported Jack Abbott, and William Styron, who argued on behalf of Benjamin
Reid.  In all four cases, the writer's intervention produced an acquittal,
parole, release or commuted sentence.  

	Kornilova died a little over a year after she was acquitted, but each
of the Americans committed violent crimes again after their release, subjecting
the writers to harsh criticism that they were accomplices in the subsequent
crimes committed by their "wards."

	Rosenshield, author of the book, "Crime and Punishment:  The Techniques
of the Omniscient Author," has been a member of the UW faculty since 1970.