The English have been on a long, giddy pub crawl of late.
They love their new prime minister, Tony Blair, who has a loopy, toothy grin and lets his kids go out in public wearing polo shirts and corduroys, while the poor Royals still get trussed up in sport coats and ties.
They pat themselves on the back for showing the world they could weep over the death of Princess Diana and rebuke the Queen Mum for keeping a stiff upper lip.
They’ve decided it’s alright again to laugh at Prince Charles and his children. Last week, during a trip to South Africa, photographers caught Charles trying to divert 13-year-old Harry’s eyes from 21 bare-breasted Zulu dancers. “I say, Harry, what an amazing pair of ankles,” the photo caption in the Daily Mail said.
The English, for a change, have been having fun.
But something happened Monday night at a pub in Elton called the Rigger, about the time a British TV reporter put his arm around Vicky Woodward, handed her a pint of stout and encouraged her to hoist one for her sister Louise, who had just gotten away with murder.
England seemed to sober up.
Outside of the revelers at the pub, and the tabloids that turned Louise Woodward into a circulation crusade, many here had had mixed feelings, at best, about the trial of the teenage au pair. They hardly wanted to see one of their own children rot in a U.S. jail under a life sentence. But they also knew a baby was dead and one of their own children was responsible.
And when they heard that she was free, eating chocolates and complaining that her Boston hotel room didn’t have a proper bath, and they saw the revelers at The Rigger hooting and hollering like the nation had won the World Cup, they figured out that something was wrong.
People called talk radio stations to say they were appalled by the celebrating they saw. Amid reports that Woodward would sell her story for more than $250,000, the responsible British newspapers called on the irresponsible British newspapers to keep their money in their pockets.
The TV cameras went back to the Rigger the day after Judge Hiller B. Zobel freed Woodward, but the Louise fan club stayed home. The chief cheerleaders ventured out only to intone that they were now in mourning for the death of 8-month-old Matthew Eappen.
“Not to put too fine a point on it, the inhabitants of Elton are not debating issues of justice and morality; they are doing what we Brits excel at, they’re having a piss-up,” wrote columnist Suzanne Moore in The Independent. “The idea of Woodward coming back to Britain as a heroine strikes most of us as abhorrent.”
The British may be stuffy, but they’re not stupid. They know when they’ve seen someone get away with killing a child. And that notion seems to be sinking in back in the states.
Matthew Eappen had a fractured skull. Woodward’s plea that she did nothing but, perhaps, gently shake him a bit, wasn’t believable, and the jury knew that. The defense argument that the child had an earlier skull fracture and blood clot that nobody knew about was just as implausible.
If that defense had been put on by a Cook County public defender on behalf of a 16-year-old Chicago kid who battered his girlfriend’s baby because the kid wouldn’t quit crying, the jury would have found him guilty of murder in a heartbeat.
No judge would have thought seriously about reducing the conviction to involuntary manslaughter and setting loose the teenager who killed the child. The teen would have been convicted and it all would have been wrapped up in a six-paragraph story in the local newspapers, because it is so terribly common. No CNN, no Court TV, no trans-Atlantic crusade for justice.
In the wake of Woodward’s murder conviction much was made in the British press about how the colonies’ system of laws, based on England’s, had gone awry.
The system was fine, it just happened to be saddled with a judge who got starry-eyed when he saw he had an international audience and an opportunity to emancipate a chubby-cheeked girl with a sweet accent.
The first sign that Zobel had lost his common sense was when he decided he would be the judge for the new millennium and release his ruling on the Internet. He forgot that his responsibility was in the courtroom, which didn’t need a computer to receive his decision. That fiasco might make him the last judge for the new millennium, since computer foul-ups sent his plan awry and one British newspaper labeled him the “Internut.”
In his writings, Zobel has made it clear that he doesn’t trust juries, and he didn’t trust this one. But it was the judge, not the jury, who shouldn’t have been trusted.
At the request of the defense, and just before the jury began deliberating, Zobel ruled that the jury couldn’t convict Woodward of manslaughter. He limited its options to first- or second-degree murder, or acquittal. The jury opted for second-degree murder.
By later overturning the jury’s verdict–but not acquitting her–Zobel as much as said he had given the jury no option that was just or fair. He found justice in the one option he himself had ruled out two weeks earlier. In his opinion he cleared the jury of fault, which was hardly magnanimous, since his own indefensible logic had created the mess in the first place.
Matthew Eappen was a victim of gross child abuse. There was only one adult who could have done that to him. She’s free.
On both sides of the Atlantic, the cheering has given way to the queasy feeling that Louise Woodward pulled a fast one.
