5 Students Convicted For Selling 'Avatar'

Eighteen persons arrested last month while peddling Avatar--five Harvard students among them--were convicted in East Cambridge Court yesterday of selling obscene literature.

Fifteen of the 18, including Jacob S. Egan '68, Lewis S. W. Crampton, a third-year graduate student, Jesse Kornbluth '68, and Stephen D. Lerner '68 were fined $100 each. Two others received $300 fines. Jared Rossman '71, charged with sale of an obscenity to a minor, was sentenced to three months in the House of Correction.

All 18 were convicted for selling the 18th issue of the controversial newspaper.

Avatar lawyer Harvey A. Silverglate of Crane, Inker, and Oteri, immediately appealed the decision to the Superior Court.

Egan, Crampton, Kornbluth, and Lerner were arrested in Harvard Square on Feb. 5 with 11 other Avatar vendors, one day before Cambridge police and Avatar editors called a truce in their longrunning dispute. Rossman was arrested two days before.

Judge Lawrence F. Feloney, who handed down the convictions, ruled that only issue 18, of the three issues for which arrests have been made, was obscene. He acquitted four other Avatar salesmen arrested selling issues 16 and 17 to minors on the grounds that those issues were not obscene.

On Feb. 16, Feloney sentenced Gordon R. Foote, Jr. '70, the first Harvard student arrested for selling Avatar, to two months in the House of Correction. Foote, arrested while distributing the 17th issue, was found guilty of selling obscene literature to a minor. Foote's case is being appealed.

The only dismissal of a case involving the sale of issue 18 came after James E. Thomas, senior adviser to freshmen at Harvard, appeared as a character witness for one of the Avatar salesmen. John Shirley, 22, was acquitted after Thomas testified and after Shirley's own testimony that he was unaware of the newspaper's contents.

Feloney's objections to issue 18 were directed at a "obscene" letter printed at the top of page seven among the paper's classified ads. Both Crampton, chairman of the board for Avatar, and editor Wayne M. Hansen, who received one of the $300 fines, took the stand to defend the letter and the rest of Avatar's contents.

The newspaper is for those "who prefer to tell it like it is," Crampton said.