An attorney for retired Ohio autoworker John Demjanjuk today challenged the admissibility of two photo lineups used to identify Demjanjuk as a sadistic death camp guard and convict him of Nazi war drimes. In his appeal before a five-judge Supreme Court panel, defense attorney Yoram Sheftel also attacked the trial court for failing to halt prejudicial press coverage of the trial. A three-judge panel in April 1988 found Demjanjuk, 70, guilty of committing crimes against humanity and crimes against Jews, and sentenced him to death. The trial judges accepted the testimony of survivors who identified the Ukrainian-born Demjanjuk with the help of photographs as ``Ivan the Terrible,'' who operated gas chambers at Treblinka death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. More than 850,000 Jews perished there in 1942-43. Demjanjuk claims he is a victim of mistaken identity and that he was incarcerated in German POW camps after being captured while serving in the Soviet Red Army. Sheftel began the appeal Monday by challenging the Israeli court's jurisdiction to try an extradited suspect for war crimes and accusing the trial judges of being biased. He expanded on the bias argument today, blaming the judges for the emotional atmosphere surrounding the trial, including a Dec. 1, 1988, attack in which a Holocaust survivor threw acid in Sheftel's face at a funeral. Sheftel suffered an eye injury and still wears dark glasses as a result. He said the assault followed a spate of inflammatory press accounts of the trial. He cited an article that questioned his credibility and readiness as a Jew to defend an alleged Nazi collaborator. ``This was a bloodletting report,'' Sheftel said. ``The court didn't intercede or say anything. After such reports, the message is that such an action (attacking Sheftel) would be heroic.'' He also disputed the admissibility of two photograph lineups. Aided by the photos, eight Treblinka survivors singled out Demjanjuk as the notorious guard ``Ivan.'' Sheftel displayed a poster containing blowups of the lineups and said there were seven flaws in the identifiction process. One lineup involved a page containing eight photographs, including a 1951 shot of Demjanjuk that he had filed with his application for a U.S. immigration visa. The second included a disputed picture of Demjanjuk from a 1942 identity card that the Soviet Union supplied to Israel. It purportedly is from the Trawniki camp, which trained death camp guards. Sheftel has claimed the Trawniki document is a forgery. He said today the photographs were improperly shown to the survivors. Demjanjuk, for example, was never called for an in-person lineup, Sheftel argued. He noted rulings in both the United States and Israel that a suspect should participate in person in criminal indentificaton procedures. Only if a suspect refuses should photographs be used, Sheftel said. Another flaw, Sheftel said, was that none of the other head shots in either lineup resembled Demjanjuk. Hair color, shape and size of faces were clearly different. ``It is like putting a photograph of a black suspect among seven white men. Where have you heard of such a thing?'' Sheftel said. Demjanjuk, wearing a brown prison uniform, sat flanked by two police guards and listened grim-faced to the daylong proceedings. His wife, Vera, and his son, John Jr., watched from the front row. Asked about the appeal's chances, John Jr. said he was hopeful. ``They have the courage to make a decision based on the facts and the law, and the conviction will be overturned.''
