After a trial, appeal, and retrial, the defendant was acquitted, but the matter of jurisdiction was not settled until United States federal law was revised in 1984.
T-3, also known as Fletcher's Ice Island, was a large iceberg floating in the Arctic Ocean, measuring approximately sixty square kilometres.
They returned with Escamilla, via Thule, to Dulles Airport in Virginia, where he was arrested to stand trial for first degree murder.
[1] The iceberg itself was thought to have been calved from an ice shelf on Ellesmere Island in Canada,[3] though it had at one point been grounded on the Alaskan coast.
The Department for External Affairs stated that they wished to avoid any appearance of interfering with a criminal trial in order to resolve a complex point of international law, but that this was without any prejudice to their territorial claims.
[1] Judge Lewis indicated that in the absence of clear precedent, this was not a definite decision, and he expected the matter to be resolved on appeal.
[2][5] The defence also argued that the jury should be instructed to consider the special conditions which were present on T-3 – for example, the lack of law enforcement and the absence of lockable doors – and how they might affect what constituted negligent conduct.
They upheld the appeal and ordered a retrial on the basis that the initial trial should not have restricted the number of character witnesses, and should have directed the jury to consider whether the Arctic conditions would require different standards for determining criminality.
This left the question unclear should a similar issue arise in future cases, either in Arctic waters or in Antarctica.