Peggy Noonan: Armchair Juror

As far as political pundits go, there is no one more vacuous and insubstantial than Peggy Noonan. As I've noted before, her columns read like something she dictated into a tape recorder on her drive to work. Her understanding of the facts is superficial at best, and she invariably supports her strange knee-jerk opinions with arguments that any 12-year old could easily turn back around on her. In fact, Noonan has such a tendency to make these self-destructive arguments that I named an award after her.

Noonan's latest column is a real masterpiece. It's titled: "They Should Have Killed Him." The "him" she's referring to is Zacharias Moussaoui, who on Wednesday was sentenced to life in prison (and spared the death penalty) for his tangential role in the planning of the 9/11 attacks.

The jury in the Moussaoui case, like all "death-qualified juries," was pre-selected to weed out anyone opposed in principle to the death penalty (a process which eliminates a significant percentage of the population and packs the jury with pro-death penalty jurors). This jury sat through a 7 week sentencing trial in which some of the very best prosecutors in the country made as strong a case as they could for the death penalty. At the end of the trial, these jurors deliberated for 41 hours over 7 days. After hearing all the evidence and deliberating thoroughly, they decided that the government had not met its burden, and they voted for life imprisonment.
Here's how Peggy Noonan responded:

Excuse me, I'm sorry, and I beg your pardon, but
the jury's decision on Moussaoui gives me a very
bad feeling. What we witnessed here was not the
higher compassion but a dizzy failure of nerve. . . .

It is as if we've become sophisticated beyond our
intelligence, savvy beyond wisdom. Some might
say we are showing a great and careful generosity,
as befits a great nation. But maybe we're just, or
also, rolling in our high-mindedness like a puppy in
the grass. Maybe we are losing some crude old grit.
Maybe it's not good we lose it.

She later adds, "This isn't a decision, it's a non sequitur."

Can't you just picture her dictating this column as she weaves through traffic, honking her horn? How entirely absurd is it for someone to so casually and obnoxiously second guess a decision made by a jury that was actually privy to all the facts and seated in the same room as Moussaoui for months? How shameless.

Yes, if those jurors had disregarded the law and the facts and shown a little more "nerve" and "grit," this country would truly be better off. As Dahlia Lithwick notes in a column on Slate:

In the end, the only real link between the
acknowledged fact that Moussaoui was a terrorist
who was willing to die in a suicide attack and the
actual attacks of 9/11 existed in the minds of the
prosecution. And, at the last minute, these links
sprang to life in the fantasy world of the terrorist
himself, who cooked up a strange Forrest Gump
plot-starring himself and Richard Reid-that the
judge herself considered to be hooey and that
even the prosecutors didn't believe.

Moussaoui is undoubtedly a bad person and clearly more than a little crazy. But you don't just toss the facts and the law out the window because someone is "bad" and was associated with even worse people. That's what makes us better than the jihadists we're fighting.

Maybe Noonan should move to Iran. They execute lots of people there and without bothering with any "high-minded" trials or due process. Lot's of "nerve" there and "crude old grit." She'd love it.

UPDATE: John Podhoretz weighs in:

There is only one justifiable reason for a juror to
make this choice. That juror has to believe the
death penalty is wrong under any and all
circumstances. To imagine that there can be any
mitigating circumstance regarding Moussaoui's
actual guilt is moral idiocy of the highest order.
Alas, that moral idiocy was clearly at work in the
jury deliberations.

What a complete and total ass. As I said before, any competent prosecutor "death qualifies" a jury during the empanelling process, which means disqualifying people who "believe the death penalty is wrong under any and all circumstances." Plus, being opposed to the death penalty is hardly "moral idiocy." How unbelievably condescending. Add JPod to the growing list of armchair jurors. As a commenter points out, JPod was referring to a belief in the existance of mitigating circumstances as "moral idiocy", not general opposition to the death penalty. That's actually worse, though. I'm willing to bet that JPod did not sit through the seven week sentencing trial or the seven days of jury deliberations. I doubt his knowledge of the facts or law of this case is particularly deep, and at the very least, I'm pretty sure it pales in comparison to the members of that jury. And he doesn't even know what the basis of their decision was. Yet JPod is willing to accuse the jury of "moral idiocy". That's pretty weak.