Au Pair Trial Packs Punch to Society, Justice

The trial of Louise Woodward rolled through American society like an avalanche--starting small, then gathering strength. When it ended Monday, with Judge Hiller Zobel’s decision to free the 19-year-old au pair, the final crash resounded nationwide.

“Why don’t we just abolish the jury system?” demanded one caller to Court TV, whose live gavel-to-gavel coverage of the trial contributed largely to its notoriety.

“It’s appalling. It’s ridiculous. I’m outraged,” the caller said, referring to Zobel’s decision to reduce Woodward’s charge from murder to manslaughter and sentence her only to the time she had already served in jail.

“Why do we put such a low price on a child’s life in this country?” demanded another.

Others took a far different view.

“This was a good thing--the way the system is supposed to work,” said Stanford University law professor Barbara Babcock. “The system of jury trials encompasses the role of the judge as a moderator. That’s been part of the system since the beginning.”

Georgetown University law professor Paul Rothstein referred to a judge’s power to change a verdict as “a safety valve.”

“This was an extraordinary case” in which the use of that safety valve was justified, he said, although the judge’s decision simply to release Woodward, rather than sentence her to additional time in jail, seemed “a little light.”

“It borders on a slap in the face” to the jury, he said.

So the Woodward case, which already has sparked debates at kitchen tables and water coolers across the country over child care and the conflicts facing working parents, has taken on a new role--a touchstone in discussions about juries, judges and the oddities of the American legal system.

The trial, said Lawrence Grossman, former president of NBC News, has drawn tremendous attention because “there’s a huge identification with the topic”--who is taking care of the kids?

“It’s striking a nerve on an issue that is timely.”

Because of that, the case has generated huge amounts of emotion. And, as is usually the case, the most vocal emotions are voiced by those who are angry.

When the jury convicted Woodward earlier this month, Court TV was bombarded with angry callers who defended her. Monday, most calls voiced anger at the judge’s decision to set her free, said Lynn Rosenstrach, a spokeswoman for the legal affairs cable network.

Although the attention the case has generated seems obvious now, it caught even Court TV by surprise. Attention to the trial built slowly, Rosenstrach noted.

“We knew it was going to be high profile in Massachusetts” but were uncertain about national interest, she said.

By the end, however, Court TV had a lot of company. CBS and NBC broke into their regular programming twice during the day to update viewers on the trial. ABC broke in three times. Presidential press conferences once got that sort of treatment, but that was years ago.

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In an ever more diverse country, with a proliferation of media outlets that usually seek small niches rather than broad markets, high-profile legal proceedings--which provide clear conflicts, sharply opposed sets of characters and, usually, a neat ending--have increasingly become the dramas around which national conversations are made.

“There’s a vacuum, and the most interesting case around will tend to fill it,” said Tom Goldstein, dean of Columbia University’s graduate school of journalism.

“If that brings to light previously undiscussed issues, that’s a plus,” he added. “This case raised all sorts of issues, and now it will raise all sorts of new ones about the jury system and judges’ powers.”

But whether such national debates lead, ultimately, to more light--or merely to more heat--remains questionable.

In this case, for example, the issue of whether what the judge did was right or not involves a relatively complicated legal issue on which Massachusetts law differs from that of most other states.

Shortly before the case went to the jury, Zobel had asked defense lawyers whether they would agree to have the jury consider a verdict of manslaughter along with the murder charges on which Woodward had been indicted. The defense refused--gambling that a jury facing murder or acquittal would set her free.

A good defense lawyer “always make an objection” to giving the jury additional choices, Babcock said. That way, if the client is convicted of a lesser charge, “you have grounds to appeal.”

But, in most jurisdictions, the judge routinely overrules such objections and submits all the charges to the jury. In this case, by contrast, Massachusetts law gave Woodward’s lawyers a veto over the additional charge--setting up a situation in which the jury “wasn’t given the verdict choice it needed.”

“It was a mistake of the defense” to exercise that veto, Babcock said. “It was playing with years of a person’s life.” But it was the peculiarities of Massachusetts’ law that allowed the defense to do so.

Zobel, Babcock said, was “in some sense correcting a mistake in the law,” which is the role judges traditionally play in trials.

In the immediate aftermath of Zobel’s decision, however, with Woodward’s supporters publicly popping champagne corks while her opponents accused the judge of losing sight of the fact that an innocent child had died, legal nuances of that sort seemed destined to receive little attention.