Court Discretion--and Wisdom

“The interests of justice . . . mandate my reducing the verdict to manslaughter. I do this in accordance with my discretion and my duty.” With these words Monday morning, Superior Court Judge Hiller Zobel vacated a jury’s second-degree murder verdict against British au pair Louise Woodward in Cambridge, Mass., reducing it to involuntary manslaughter. In an afternoon hearing, he cut her mandatory life sentence to the 279 days she has already served in prison. Zobel’s decision was awaited on both sides of the Atlantic.

Before the judge announced the resentencing, Woodward’s attorneys had said they would seek her acquittal in the death of an 8-month-old boy who had been in her care. State prosecutors, now angry over the judge’s decision to free Woodward, say they will launch separate appeals.

Zobel’s decision clearly will do little to diminish the parents’ grief or the debate that this case stirred up over issues of child care and responsibility faced by every working parent. But his thoughtful and no doubt anguished review of the trial record and the jury’s verdict stands as a clear affirmation of judicial discretion.

The action was an expression of a latitude--loosely bounded, grounded in human instincts of fairness--that distinguishes our justice system. It was to those instincts that Woodward’s attorneys appealed.

Discretion, exercised responsibly, is the very quality we should value most in our judges. Yet it seems to be the quality we too often fear. The drumbeat continues for still-harsher mandatory sentencing laws like California’s inflexible “three strikes and you’re out,” eliminating any recourse, suffocating judicial review. The case of Louise Woodward, who, according to Zobel, acted out of “confusion, inexperience, frustration, immaturity and some anger, but not malice (in the legal sense),” serves as a haunting counterpoint.