Point, Counterpoint

"Please, stop the violation of human rights -- don't let an innocent man die." That message last week from four Soviet Nobel prizewinners sounded remarkably like hundreds of appeals that have been sent to the Kremlin on behalf of Soviet Dissident Andrei Sakharov. But this letter was addressed to President Ronald Reagan, and the "innocent man" in question was Leonard Peltier, 39, an American Indian imprisoned for life for the 1975 killing of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Ever since Sakharov's latest hunger strike began to attract world attention, the Soviet press has been full of reports on the Jailed American Indian activist, who went on a fast in April and again in May to protest prison conditions. Peltier ended his hunger strike, but graphic Soviet newspaper accounts have continued to describe "an emaciated man, starved to exhaustion" and imprisoned on "charges trumped up by U.S. security services." The Reagan Administration points out that whatever absurd parallels Moscow may draw between the two cases, one difference remains: Sakharov has never been convicted of murder.