Fair and Square

In sentencing Oliver L. North on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Gerhard A. Gesell displayed the same unsentimental fairness and keen sense of judicial integrity he employed throughout the former Marine colonel’s difficult and politically charged trial.

Two months ago, a jury convicted the one-time National Security Council aide of accepting an illegal gratuity, of destroying classified documents and of aiding and abetting obstruction of Congress through participation in the compilation of a false account of how the United States assisted in the shipment of arms to Iran. All three acts were felonies, and Gesell could have sent North to prison for as long as 10 years and fined him as much as $750,000. The judge, however, sentenced the man Ronald Reagan once called “an American hero” to a three-year suspended sentence, two years’ probation, 1,200 hours of community service and a $150,000 fine.

In determining those penalties, Gesell said he took into account North’s distinguished service as a military officer and his belief, based on court testimony, that North--his self-aggrandizement notwithstanding--acted as “a low-ranking subordinate, who was carrying out the instructions of a few cynical superiors.”

A jurist less faithful to the spirit, as well as the letter of the law, might have been tempted to make an example of this arrogant and misguided self-promoter, so that others of similar bent might be deterred from what Gesell rightly called a “tragic breach of the public trust.”

But Oliver North was not called to justice as the agent of a failed policy. Nor is he now to be punished as the exemplar of a perverted notion of public service. He was tried, convicted and sentenced as an individual who broke the laws that apply equally to us all.

Our system’s respect for individual rights and demand for individual responsibility derive their moral authority from their reliance on reason and not on the thirst for revenge, on the place they make for mercy, as well as justice. However badly Oliver North failed the American system, the American system did not fail him.