When a jury last week refused to impose the death penalty on Zacarias Moussaoui, the vociferous defendant launched one of his typical outbursts. “America, you lost!” he shouted triumphantly. Was he right?

No. The trial was about more than winning. It was about defining Mr. Moussaoui himself — and about three core ethical values inherent in Western legal systems.

Honesty. Like most trials in Western democracies, this one was open, scrupulously conducted, and freely reported. In marked contrast to the quick show-trials favored by tyrannies, this two-month exercise put on display a refined system of jurisprudence. That system is more interested in principles than in consequences. Who wins or loses is of less importance than whether the legal values are honored. Every time an obvious thug goes free under this system, that point becomes clear: If the choice is between convicting a felon or protecting the system, the system wins every time. That, apparently, is a hard concept for vigilantes — including terrorists — to grasp, accustomed as they are to tyrannies and black-and-white realities. Hence Mr. Moussaoui’s wishful outburst.

Respect. This trial also respected Mr. Moussaoui’s right to a voice — however loud and obstreperous — in the proceedings. While sustaining that respect must have been as wearisome for Judge Leonie Brinkema as it was for the judges presiding over the similarly noisy trials of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or Slobodan Milosevic in The Hague, she maintained tight control. At the end, she extended that same respect to family members of the victims of the 9/11 attacks. She invited them to address the court, eliciting some direct and powerful statements. Mr. Moussaoui, by contrast, took advantage of that climate of respect to lash out in vituperative disrespect against the court, the victims, and the nation — suggesting an essentially different conception of justice within his ideology.

Responsibility. As its surprising outcome showed, this trial was also a responsible proceeding. The jury, while accepting the prosecution’s arguments that Mr. Moussaoui (who pleaded guilty) was eligible to die, nevertheless backed away from such a sentence. Did that reflect the emotional wrench facing jurors who must vote on whether to take another’s life? Did it reflect growing concern in America about the morality of capital punishment, a penalty in declining use around the world? Did it reflect a recognition that death would give Mr. Moussaoui what he seemed to crave — a martyr’s glory? Whatever the reason, the jury telegraphed two key points: that American justice isn’t about revenge, and that it’s difficult to condemn someone to die whose crime wasn’t physical (killing others) but conceptual (deceiving those who might have stopped the killings).

But in the end, this was a trial about Mr. Moussaoui’s identity. He tried to cast himself as a figure of dread, hurling curses and prophesying doom, which is what made Judge Brinkema’s final comment so compelling. Sentencing him to life without parole in solitary confinement, she addressed him directly. “You came here to be a martyr and to die in a great big bang of glory,” she said, according to the New York Times, “but to paraphrase the poet T. S. Eliot, instead you will die with a whimper.”

T. S. Eliot? Exactly. The reference is to the American-turned-British poet’s “The Hollow Men,” which ends with the famous lines about “the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.” Written in 1925 and reflecting the post-World War I angst and disorientation of his earlier poem “The Waste Land,” it depicts a scarecrow world of manlike shapes stuffed with straw rather than spirit, whose whisperings are “meaningless / As wind in dry grass.” Among their greatest fear is the way they will be remembered: not as “lost / Violent souls,” but only as “the hollow men.”

In the end, that’s an accurate portrayal not only of Mr. Moussaoui but of terrorism itself. Lost and violent, unable to see beyond consequences and erect lasting principles, effective not through any continuity of power but only by engendering fear out of proportion to its size, terrorism operates as much through image as through action.

Perhaps that’s why Mr. Moussaoui was so desperate to spread the image of fear, without which he might have appeared hollow. Perhaps that’s why the citizen comments addressed directly to him were so significant. Perhaps that’s why Judge Brinkema was so firm in her final comment.

“You will never again get a chance to speak,” she told him, describing his future in prison, “and that is an appropriate and fair ending.”

©2006 Institute for Global Ethics

A reader responds to last week’s commentary about the plagiarism incident involving Raytheon CEO William Swanson:

I have to say that this whole Swanson scandal has me … disappointed. To quote 17 rules verbatim and in order without attributing them is just hubris! 

Now he’s been fined $1 million for plagiarism. I’ve got a copy of “his” unwritten rule myself. I love it, and I’ve recommended it to attendees of many of the seminars that I teach across the country. So yes, I have mixed feelings about this issue. On the one hand, here is a business leader who has shared some of the principles and practices that have brought him success. He, through the company he heads, shares it free with the world. That’s pretty impressive. Yes, he benefits by knowing he is leaving a legacy, but we all benefit as well. I’m glad to have his book. I’m afraid that the book will be taken off of Raytheon’s “shelves” because of this, rather than printed in a second edition that credits the originator of those 17 rules. Then others won’t benefit from the lessons of the book, which would be a shame.

On the other hand, your point on the example this theft sets is not to be ignored or fluffed off. Our leaders are obligated by their positions to set an example for the rest of us. When a leader lets us down, he does far more damage than the original crime in and of itself.

Swanson’s point — that we accumulate wisdom from sources we forget — is well-taken. I wonder how many things I’ve said that weren’t nearly as original as I thought because I’ve absorbed others’ lessons and made them my own. But at least I paraphrase….

– Ted Coiné, CEO
Coiné Corporate Training
Boston, Massachusetts, USA

“The governor hasn’t pardoned anyone, be it alive or deceased. The governor isn’t going to issue a pardon here.”

– Pete Smith, spokesman for Mississippi governor Haley Barbour (R), rejecting demands for the pardon of Clyde Kennard, a black man falsely imprisoned and targeted by the state over 45 years ago for his efforts to desegregate a local college. State officials blocked Kennard from enrolling in the college, plotted to kill him, and sent him to prison under false charges — stealing chicken feed — in 1960. Kennard died of cancer while in prison.(“Pardon Unlikely for Civil Rights Advocate,” New York Times, May 4)

WASHINGTON
A U.S. federal judge formally sentenced 9/11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui to life in prison last week, bringing an end to a painful trial but beginning a new round of debate over the moral implications of the sentence.

Many, including relatives of the victims, argued that the sentence was too lenient. Some claimed that the jury’s decision not to impose the death penalty betrayed the country’s squeamishness in retaliating against terrorists.

Others argued that Moussaoui probably would have welcomed the death penalty as an avenue to martyrdom, and that life in prison will be worse than death.

As CTV reported, Moussaoui likely will be housed in a Florence, Colorado, federal prison known for its extremely harsh conditions. The facility is home to some of the United States’ most notorious criminals, including “Unabomber” Ted Kaczynski and attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid.

“He’s going to be sentenced to life in a maximum security prison with no chance of parole, under horrible jail conditions,” legal analyst Steven Skurka told CTV. “That’s really what the jury has decided.”

The Los Angeles Times noted that prisoners at the facility, which is known as “Supermax,” are locked down 23 hours a day and are monitored by motion detectors and hidden cameras. There is no pretense that Supermax prisoners will be rehabilitated and returned to society, the Times reported, quoting prison expert James Aiken as saying the whole point of the prison is “incapacitation,” not simply punishment.

Aiken testified during the sentencing phase of Moussaoui’s trial, telling jurors what to expect if they sent the defendant to Supermax for life.

“I have seen them rot,” he told jurors, according to the Times. “They rot.”

Regardless of the severity of prison conditions, dissatisfaction with prosecutors’ failure to secure a death sentence may, according to a report from the Reuters news agency, strengthen the hand of those who favor fighting terrorism with secret prisons abroad or military tribunals.

But elsewhere, particularly in the international press, there was some sentiment that justice had been served by the deliberations of a jury that in the end found there was not sufficient evidence to place Moussaoui at the center of the plot and thus impose the death sentence.

In a May 5 editorial, Times of London assistant editor Gerard Baker alluded to Moussaoui’s boast that “America, you lost,” writing, “Over the next 30 years or more I suspect that Moussaoui will have time to reconsider his hasty judgment … because in fact America won something quite big this week in Alexandria.

“It won back something it has lost a little of in the past few years. It reminded a world that has grown a bit doubtful that the United States still represents the very highest ideals of humanity — freedom, fairness, compassion and above all, justice.”

LONDON
British prime minister Tony Blair, facing a series of ethics crises that apparently contributed to his party’s dismal showing in last week’s local elections, has reshuffled his cabinet.

Among the casualties was John Prescott, the deputy prime minister caught up in a highly publicized affair with his secretary. The New York Times reported that while Prescott kept his title and cabinet seat, he was stripped of many of his responsibilities for housing, local government, and planning.

Home Secretary Charles Clarke was axed outright. He had been on shaky ground since it was revealed that hundreds of foreign nationals were released mistakenly from British prisons without any steps taken to deport them, the Guardian reported.

Blair’s approval ratings began to plummet several weeks ago when opponents charged that his Labour party had rewarded political donors with honors such as appointment to the House of Lords. The Independent reported that the probe into the allegations widened last week, with Scotland Yard calling in several more people for questioning.

The Scotsman reported that the cumulative effect of the scandals weakened support among traditional Labour supporters, and that the election results — in which Labour lost more than 300 seats — have led to renewed calls for Blair’s timely resignation.

Blair has been expected to eventually resign and make way for his planned successor, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, but recent events are leading critics and former supporters to attempt to speed up the timetable.

WASHINGTON
The U.S. House of Representatives last week narrowly passed an ethics reform bill, with critics immediately characterizing the measure as a sham.

By a vote of 217-to-213, largely split along party lines, the House voted to require tougher penalties for violations, greater disclosure of lobbying activities, and greater accountability for special-interest “earmarks” hidden in spending bills, the Reuters news agency reported.

But the measure is weaker than the bill approved by the Senate in March, according to the Washington Bureau of the San Francisco Chronicle. While the Senate bill raises from one to two years the waiting period between the time a lawmaker or aide can leave Congress and become a lobbyist, the House bill is silent on the matter.

The Chicago Tribune reported that the House bill also keeps the current value limit of $50 for gifts from lobbyists to lawmakers, while the Senate bill outlaws gifts altogether.

Democrats, who have made corruption the centerpiece of their midterm-election campaign, pounced on the bill, claiming it would do little to end the type of corruption that scuttled the careers of now-convicted lobbyist Jack Abramoff and former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-Calif.), who was convicted and sentenced to more than eight years in prison for taking more than $2 million in bribes, according to the Associated Press.

It is “such a disappointment,” Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY) told the AP. “It does nothing to fix the battered and broken political process of this Congress.”

But House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), whose campaign for the leadership position focused on blunting Democratic exploitation of ethics issues, said the House “took another step in the right direction,” according to the Hill, a publication covering Congress.

The two versions now must be reconciled by a House-Senate conference committee.

MONTREAL
Former Canadian ad executive Jean Brault was sentenced to 30 months in prison last week for his role in a scheme to embezzle government money.

Brault was convicted of stealing more than a million dollars in an affair dubbed the Sponsorship Scandal, which evolved from an advertising campaign designed to promote the image of Quebec. The campaign ended amid allegations that the Liberal party funneled business to political cronies and that the government was billed for work that was never performed.

Judge Fraser Martin said that Brault’s actions reflected “a total abdication of ethical principles and morality,” the Montreal Gazette reported.

The sentence was unexpectedly severe because Brault had assumed the role of a whistle-blower and a year ago was actually cheered by spectators after his testimony at an inquiry probing the scandals, according to reports from the Globe & Mail and the London (Ontario) Free Press. But Judge Martin said Brault deserved jail time because of the size of the fraud and because it involved taxpayer money.

Brault is the second person to receive jail time in the case. In April, fellow ad man Paul Coffin was sentenced to 18 months behind bars.

The Toronto Star reported that one trial remains, that of former federal bureaucrat Chuck Guité, who ran the advertising program for the government.

The scandals were the focus of hearings televised throughout Canada and a subsequent government probe, which placed much of the political blame on lax oversight by former prime minister Jean Chrétien, who retired in 2003.

GENEVA
The United States last week defended its treatment of terror detainees and told a United Nations committee that it backed a ban on torture.

State Department legal adviser John Bellinger said there had been “relatively few cases of actual abuse” and that the Bush administration was “absolutely committed to uphold its national and international obligations to eradicate torture,” the Reuters news agency reported.

Bellinger led the U.S. delegation in its appearance before the U.N. Committee on Torture, which asked about a wide range of issues, including Washington’s interpretation of a global ban on torture and interrogation methods in prisons such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, the Associated Press reported.

While the committee chairman praised the United States for its contributions to human rights, some panelists were skeptical of U.S. claims and accused the Americans of playing word games and mounting a legalistic defense instead of dealing with the substance of specific cases, according to a report from the Knight Ridder news service.

At the center of the debate was the U.S. view that the International Convention Against Torture does not apply to armed conflicts.

The Agence France-Presse reported that Bellinger urged the panel not to believe every report of abuse, but he did acknowledge later that the United States was trying to correct its course after revelations of mistreatment of terror suspects.

“Obviously when a country suffers the deaths of 3,000 people on a single day and then had to go into armed conflict with Al Qaeda to try to root out terrorism, it takes some time to rebalance,” he told journalists, according to the AFP.

VARIOUS
Two separate high-profile plagiarism cases rocked the publishing industry last week, involving an unlikely pair from Massachusetts: a corporate CEO and a Harvard undergrad.

Directors of the Raytheon Company, based in Waltham, docked CEO William Swanson about $1 million for failing to give credit for material he used in a management book distributed by the company, the New York Times reported. Raytheon also stopped promoting the booklet, “Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management,” a folksy tome that propelled Swanson to management guru status.

It was revealed that 17 of Swanson’s 33 entries were lifted from a 1944 book called “The Unwritten Laws of Engineering,” written by a UCLA engineering professor. The Boston Herald last week reported that Swanson apparently snatched five other rules — one from a book by humor columnist Dave Barry and four from a 2001 Wall Street Journal article by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, according to the Times.

At last week’s shareholders meeting, Swanson said that his staff members had compiled his book from a presentation he made several years ago, and that he had turned over notes and materials — including the engineering book — to his staff, the International Herald Tribune reported.

Swanson acknowledged that he “did not properly check the source material for that presentation and did not confirm the appropriate attribution of the material,” according to the International Herald Tribune.

Earlier in the week, a Harvard student who had been celebrated for her debut novel How Opal Mehta Got Wild, Got Kissed and Got a Life had her book recalled and a contract for another torn up after allegations that she had plagiarized the works of several writers. The London Telegraph reported that Kaavya Viswanathan, who was born in India and brought up in Scotland, was accused of plagiarizing two writers, including a British novelist, a week after she was found to have copied from another source.

According to the Scotsman, the now-scuttled publishing deal was worth about half a million dollars.

Both cases — Swanson and Viswanathan — refocused attention on the treacherous intersection of intellectual property and increasingly sophisticated cut-and-paste technology.

In an opinion piece in the San Jose Mercury News, writers Ellen Heltzel and Margo Hammond offered this observation: “The fallout resulting from the two recent plagiarism incidents suggests how lamely we as a society are dealing with what has become a significant problem in the new world order of Google, with its ability to churn out information, and Wikipedia, where people are encouraged to edit others’ words, leaving open the question of who gets to claim ownership.”

“Yes, Swanson offered his mea culpa,” Heltzel and Hammond wrote, “but Swanson didn’t lose his job or even suffer a demotion for breaking the rules of writerly good conduct. Although his company docked his wages by $1 million, that’s a mere trifle, given current levels of CEO compensation. As for Viswanathan, she said the copying was ‘unconscious and unintentional.’… Only when evidence emerged that she also might have borrowed passages from another novelist, Sophie Kinsella, did her publisher, Little, Brown, remove copies of Opal from store shelves and announce that its deal with Viswanathan — reportedly sealed with a $500,000 kiss — was off.”

LONDON
A 63-year-old woman who became pregnant after fertility treatments is defending her decision to become Britain’s oldest mother.

Dr. Patricia Rashbrook, a child psychiatrist, received treatments from a controversial Italian fertility specialist, Dr. Severino Antinori, and is expected to give birth in about two months.

According to the Times of London, Rashbrook had been trying to conceive since she was in her mid-50s. She issued a statement with her husband saying, “We are very happy to have given life to an already much-loved baby, and our wish now is to give him the peace and security he needs.”

But the moral implications of a 62-year-old woman expecting a baby have stirred criticism, some of it abrasive. The Scotsman reported that Rashbrook has found herself described as “selfish,” “unnatural,” and “obviously nuts.”

The Independent quoted a series of experts who proclaimed her decision was “not sensible,” “irrational,” and “risky,” though one commentator, a psychotherapist, noted that there are many babies born to 25-year-olds who are neglected and abandoned.

For his part, Dr. Antinori claimed that the mother-to-be could live for another 20 years, saying, “We are not giving birth to an orphan,” the Scotsman reported.

“I specialize in helping couples have children who can’t and if I can bring them happiness, where is the harm?” Antinori told the Guardian.

NEW YORK
The three largest soft-drink companies in the United States last week announced that they will begin removing most soft drinks from school cafeterias and vending machines.

The New York Times reported that Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Cadbury Schweppes agreed to a planned phase-out under a deal brokered by former U.S. president Bill Clinton and the American Heart Association. The soda bottlers also had been negotiating with other groups, and, according to attorneys interviewed by the Times, agreed to the measure in large part to avoid litigation.

Under the terms of the agreement, the firms will remove high-calorie, sugar-laden drinks from schools between now and 2008, replacing them with bottled water, natural fruit juice, and diet soda, Time magazine reported.

Some critics say that while the agreement seems to be a move in the right direction, it may not be whole answer to the childhood obesity epidemic because sodas represent less than half of school vending machine sales and there is no practical way to keep students from carrying high-calorie drinks in with them.

In a separate agreement, Refreshments Canada, the main trade association representing Canada’s soft-drink industry, agreed that new contracts signed with high schools will allow only low-calorie drinks such as diet soda and juice and sports drinks with no more than 100 calories per container. The provisions are similar to an agreement already in place for Canada’s middle and elementary schools, according to the Globe & Mail. Canadian schools that already have contracts with soft-drink manufacturers will be encouraged, though not required, to go the low-calorie route.

BEIJING
Chinese modern art, like modern art everywhere, has been pushing the limits of propriety, but as the Christian Science Monitor reported last week, authorities have drawn the line at anything that carries an unacceptable political theme.

Staff writer Robert Marquand noted that galleries in a chic art district in Beijing have been told to remove 20 paintings in recent weeks, all with unacceptable political messages. One, for example, depicted tanks in Tiananmen Square.

While some works depicting sexuality or apparently disparaging religion have not raised eyebrows, Marquand reported, anything suggesting criticism of the government often inspires visits by the so-called culture police. In addition to closing some shows featuring unacceptable work, officials have banned catalogs for the exhibits and tracked down articles and interviews in local magazines and halted their publication.

“This is China and it is still run by the Communist Party,” said one artist who requested anonymity. “You look outside and see skyscrapers. But a lot isn’t modernized.”

From Harris Interactive:

“One-third of U.S. adults (32%) have less than positive feelings toward AmericaÆs charitable organizations and the same number (32%) thinks that the nonprofit sector in America has pretty seriously gotten off in the wrong direction, according to a survey by Harris Interactive®. While a majority of adults may have positive feelings toward nonprofits (68% give them a score of 51 or higher out of 100) and most (92%) households have contributed to a charity in the last year (up from 80% in October 2005), only one in 10 (10%) strongly agrees that charitable organizations are honest and ethical in their use of donated funds. Almost half (48%) somewhat agrees with this sentiment, while slightly more than one-quarter (27%) somewhat or strongly disagrees that these organizations use donated funds honestly and ethically, and another 15 percent are not sure.

“These are some of the results from the latest Harris Interactive DonorPulse survey, conducted quarterly, designed to track trends related to charity and philanthropy in the United States….

“Despite their ambivalence about the direction they see the sector headed in, the vast majority of Americans continue to make cash donations to individual nonprofit organizations….

• “More than nine in 10 adults (92%) say they or someone in their household made a financial contribution to a nonprofit organization in the past year, up from 80 percent when last asked in October 2005….
• “In 2005, the largest percentages of donors gave to churches and religious organizations (50%) and disaster relief organizations (47%), followed by community groups and programs (35%), human service organizations (34%), and organizations that serve youth and children (30%)….

“David Clayton, Vice President of the Nonprofit and Social Issues Research Group at Harris Interactive, comments, ‘This survey highlights the American publicÆs tremendous commitment to the principles of charity and philanthropy. It also suggests that nonprofits could communicate more to the public about the real improvements in individual lives and communities that their altruism translates into.’

“Some adults choose to do their part by donating their time. About two-thirds (64%) of those who have participated in a volunteer activity do so at least once per month with 36 percent volunteering on a daily or weekly basis….”

“No totalitarians, no wars, no fears, famines, or perils of any kind can really break a man’s spirit until he breaks it himself by surrendering. Tyranny has many dread powers, but not the power to rule the spirit.”

– Edgar Sheffield Brightman (U.S. philosopher and theologian, 1884-1953)