Legal Briefs

> His brother was permanently paralyzed from the neck down in a motorcycle accident, and Lester Zygmaniak, 23, had reached an agonizing decision. "I am here today to end your pain, George. Is that all right with you?" Lester asked. George nodded yes from his hospital bed, and Lester pulled a sawed-off shotgun from under his coat. "The next thing I knew I had shot him," Lester told jurors in Freehold, N.J. as they considered murder charges against him. Last week, after 2 1/2 hours of deliberation, they found Lester not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. They also found that he was now sane, and he left the court a free man. The verdict was in keeping with past practice: in the U.S. in so-called mercy-killing cases defendants rarely get more than a light sentence and often not even that.

> The idea seemed a natural. The Blackfeet Indian tribe, having full authority over its affairs on the reservation, would authorize the installation of slot machines. White and red man alike could gamble away, and the tribe's coffers would fatten. But when the Palomino Bar on the edge of Glacier National Park put in four machines, a federal agent promptly confiscated the one-armed bandits. A tribal court issued a restraining order, and the whole thing wound up before Federal District Judge Russell Smith. "No doubt the Indian tribes were at one time sovereign, and even now the tribes are sometimes described as being sovereign," said the judge. "The blunt fact, however, is that an Indian tribe is sovereign to the extent that the United States permits it to be sovereign." And Congress long ago banned gambling devices "within Indian country." Final score: Great White Father 1, Blackfeet 0.

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