Hazelwood Trial Ends; Fate Rests With Jurors : Oil spill: The attorneys give closing arguments. The key questions: Was the captain drunk? Was he reckless when he turned the ship over to a mate?

An Alaska prosecutor told jurors Tuesday that the Exxon Valdez plowed into Bligh Reef a year ago this week because its captain, Joseph Hazelwood, his “mind clouded by alcohol,” gambled with safety.

The result, said Brent Cole in closing arguments at Hazelwood’s criminal trial, was “a captain’s worst nightmare” and a massive oil spill.

But defense attorneys, who acknowledged that Hazelwood had a few drinks before sailing, challenged the alcohol impairment allegations as “absurd.”

The critical mistakes that doomed the supertanker were made by others, said Fairbanks attorney Dick Madson, who pointed to the performance of the helmsman and third mate on watch when the accident occurred.

“Captain Hazelwood is not perfect . . . he made mistakes,” Madson told jurors in his summation. However, he said, Hazelwood’s errors were not sufficient “to brand him a criminal.”

The closing arguments marked the end of more than seven weeks of trial.

Hazelwood, 43, of Huntington, N.Y., is charged with one felony, criminal mischief, and three misdemeanors: reckless endangerment, operating a vessel while intoxicated and negligent discharge of oil. If convicted, he could receive 7 1/4 years in prison and $61,000 in fines.

Following arguments, Superior Court Judge Karl Johnstone instructed jurors on the law for about an hour, then told them to select a foreman and begin their deliberations.

They spent about 10 minutes behind closed doors, then retired for the day. They were to resume this morning.

The six-woman, six-man jury faces two key questions:

Was the captain drunk, and was he reckless when he left the bridge in control of his third mate while steering around ice floes?

The trial produced substantial conflicting evidence.

Prosecutors said Hazelwood stayed in a bar all afternoon drinking before he sailed. But shipmates said he had only two or three drinks and a Valdez florist produced a receipt showing Hazelwood had been in her shop ordering flowers for his wife when a prosecution witness claimed he was drinking.

Investigators and others noticed alcohol on Hazelwood’s breath, but 21 witnesses who saw him before and after the accident testified that they noticed no signs of impairment.

A blood alcohol test produced a reading of .061%, a level well below the state’s .10% minimum to presume he was drunk, but the test was taken more than 10 hours after the accident.

A state expert, using a controversial “retrograde extrapolation” formula, said the captain could have had a blood alcohol level of .14 to more than .20 at the time he boarded the ship.

Madson scoffed at that, showing jurors pictures of the narrow gangway that Hazelwood had to cross to board his ship that night.

“That’s the toughest sobriety test you’ll ever see,” Madson said, further citing what he called the “one, solid, uniform voice” of witnesses who unanimously testified that they saw no physical evidence that Hazelwood was impaired by alcohol.

Cole also said that Hazelwood was not considering the ship’s safety when he left the bridge in Cousins’ sole control. At the time, the ship was changing course to go around glacier ice that had spread into the shipping lanes.

But Madson argued that Hazelwood left a qualified and competent mate in charge of making what he called a routine and simple maneuver. What Hazelwood could not foresee, Madson said, was that the helmsman would fail to follow the mate’s orders to turn the ship.

Prosecutor Cole said that Hazelwood himself had admitted responsibility for the accident. He referred to earlier testimony by an Exxon supervisor that Hazelwood, in a phone call an hour after the accident, “indicated that it was his fault, he was to blame, that he had just gone down to do some paper work when this happened and he should have been on the bridge.”

The defense has taken pains to point out that Hazelwood considered himself responsible in the timeless tradition of maritime captains who have lost their ships. But his attorneys vigorously deny that he is a criminal in the fashion of a drunk and criminally negligent driver.

Hazelwood, accompanied to the courtroom by his wife and father, listened impassively as Cole declared that the since-fired captain “did not have safety first on his mind when he drank” before sailing.

Cole, describing tankers as “ecological time bombs,” said that when Hazelwood drank he “chose to be a gambler . . . a risk-taker” who jeopardized the safety of his ship.

“He gambled that . . . his drinking would not adversely affect his judgment and decision-making that night. He was wrong.”

Madson argued that drinking had nothing to do with the accident, that Hazelwood’s orders were proper and prudent and that he had no reason to doubt the ability of his third mate, Gregory T. Cousins, to handle “a routine maneuver.”

During the trial Cole was sometimes frustrated by prosecution witnesses--particularly crew members--who often seemed to support defense claims that the captain wasn’t drunk or responsible for the grounding. In one surprising attack during his final arguments Cole blamed the Exxon corporation.

Pointing to Exxon attorneys in the audience who have been present throughout the trial, Cole suggested that the company had pressured employees to give testimony favorable to Hazelwood.

“It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to see Exxon’s interest . . . in seeing Captain Hazelwood get acquitted,” Cole said.

The assertion brought a scornful response from Madson, who said Exxon is one of several entities--including the state of Alaska and the Coast Guard--who have tried to make Hazelwood the scapegoat for their own failures.

“Politics . . . is the reason we’re here today,” Madson said.