It’s a rainy day on the NR cruise, so I’ve been watching the news and hearing a lot of really uninformed lawyer commentary on the Ghailani case. A few points, some (but not all) of which are also in my column, are worth making.

People ought to be careful about portraying the verdict as an abject failure. Ghailani may only have been convicted on one count, but he will almost certainly be sentenced to life in prison for it. You only live once – he’s going to do as much time as he would have done had the jury convicted him on the other 284 counts. The result should not please anyone – inconsistent verdicts are scandalous, and they undermine the integrity of results in the justice system. But let’s not get carried away: this guy is never going to get out of jail.

I heard a lawyer a little while ago insist that the inconsistent verdicts – apparently a compromise between most jurors who wanted to convict on everything and one juror who wanted to acquit – creates a major issue on appeal. It doesn’t. We don’t like inconsistent verdicts because they suggest the jurors did not follow the court’s instructions or did not understand the case. That is, if you think the guy was in the bombing conspiracy, there’s no basis not to convict him on all the murders, etc.

But however embarrassed they make us, we tolerate inconsistent verdicts in the interest of finality. The lawyer I was listening to was urging that on appeal, defense lawyers would argue that the conviction should be thrown out because, if Ghailani had really been guilty of conspiracy, the jury would have convicted him on the other charges, too. But it is just as justifiably (and, here, more accurately) argued that it is the series of acquittals that doesn’t make rational sense. Far from being a victim of an irrational verdict, Ghailani is better seen as the beneficiary.