Anchorage Jury Metes Out Justice

We esteem the Founding Fathers as preeminent representatives of the Age of Reason. But in at least one aspect of their great endeavor--our Constitution and its Bill of Rights--they also were men of faith, for their charter of liberty evinces the belief in the ability of juries to render justice.

Time has vindicated the Founders’ act of faith, and it did so once again last week in the case of Joseph Hazelwood, who was acquitted of three felony counts stemming from the grounding of his tanker, Exxon Valdez, in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. The Anchorage jury--whose members included homemakers, an insurance broker, a real estate agent, an accountant, a letter carrier and an air-traffic controller--convicted Hazelwood of one misdemeanor count of negligent discharge of oil in the worst such incident in American history.

Whether that verdict was correct is, in a vital sense, beside the point. What matters is that 12 residents of a state that had suffered trauma and devastating economic loss because of the accident refused to make a scapegoat of the rather unsympathetic man within their grasp. Instead, acting solely on the evidence presented and on the law as they were instructed upon it, they voted to give what they saw as justice to the person before them.

In doing so, they vindicated not only the Founding Fathers’ faith, but also our own fidelity to the compact we Americans have made with one another. It holds that when our own lives and liberty are at stake, we will trust in the deliberations not of experts, saints or sages but of 12 ordinary people just like us.