TRIALS: Dismissals at Kent State

The killing of four students at Kent State University in May 1970 was followed by what many people considered almost an equal outrage. A special grand jury exonerated the National Guard of any blame for the deaths while it returned indictments against 25 students and others for participating in the campus disorders. But later a U.S. district court judge ordered the grand jury's report destroyed, and last week 20 indictments still pending were dismissed for lack of evidence.

The strongest cases had come to trial first. Jerry Rupe, 23, was convicted of a misdemeanor for interfering with a fireman at the scene of the burning ROTC building. Two other students pleaded guilty to first-degree rioting. A fourth defendant was freed when a principal witness failed to identify him. In a fifth case, Mary Helen Nicholas turned out to have told a state investigator that she had grabbed a firehose, but she was never told that the statement could be used against her. Judge Edwin Jones directed a not-guilty verdict.

Once he did so, Ohio Attorney General William Brown, 31, asked the court to drop charges against the remaining 20 defendants, among them Craig Morgan, who was president of the Kent State student body at the time of the shootings. Brown emphasized that his decision was not intended to "vindicate or criticize the special grand jury, the students, the National Guard or the administration of the university." Though Kent State President Glenn A. Olds applauded Brown's "sensitivity to the interest of justice," many students were not appeased. Said Donna Clark, vice president of the student government: "Four persons are dead, ten were wounded and 25 had indictments hanging over their heads for more than a year. If that is justice, it is a screwy definition of it."

But it is a justice that the students will probably have to settle for. The only other litigation still pending consists of some civil damage suits against state officials and National Guard officers brought by parents of the students who were killed. Kent State, the bitter climax to campus rebellion, is about to pass into history.