Caylee Anthony

I'm so sorry to bring this up, but having had a couple days to think about this, I think I can reflect and I think I need to.

In case you don't know, Casey Anthony was on trial for the murder of her daughter Caylee. This all went down in Florida. The girl had been "missing" for a month before anyone reported it (and even then it was the grandparents), the mom had been out partying and shopping (and participating in "hot body" contests) during that month and lying about the daughter's whereabouts (she invented a nanny who lived in a fake address), she had been lying about her job, she probably wrote a diary entry about having made the right decision, evidence points to a dead body having been in her car (multiple people reported smelling decaying human remains in the car, plus there was a hair with evidence of "banding" that occurs at death), she borrowed a shovel from the neighbors around the time the girl disappeared, and there were multiple Google searches on her computer for how to make cloroform. One of the theories was that maybe the girl accidentally drowned, then Casey tried to cover it up. But her skull was found with duct tape over the mouth. Oh yeah, and it's a rare kind of duct tape that, coincidentally, the family had and used on the missing posters and a gas can. Yeah. Anyway, she was found not guilty.

And there was outrage, because the court of public opinion had pretty much found her guilty. And then there was backlash to the outrage, because shouldn't our courts err on the side of caution? Isn't letting guilty people go sometimes better than putting innocent people in jail? And after all, the backlash liked to include, there was only circumstantial evidence. Oh yeah, and we weren't in the courtroom so we don't know everything the jurors do.

Well, I disagree with the backlashers and I'm still outraged. I'm sorry, and I know there are good points to be made on the other side, but the chick is guilty as sin, and circumstantial evidence is TOTALLY good enough to convict based on. The other kind of evidence is direct evidence, and direct evidence is when somebody SAW the crime occur. How often does that happen?

Take the Scott Peterson/Laci Peterson case: There was bleach all over the house, a corpse-sniffing dog traced the scent of Laci's body from their house to the dock where he kept his boat, he made a bunch of anchors that are all missing... The dude killed his wife and dumped her body. It's reasonable to take all that evidence into account and find him guilty. It would be NICE if some random paperboy saw him shoot her through the window or something, but it's not necessary in order to convict. I believe the circumstantial evidence in the case was overwhelming, just like in the Casey Anthony case.

Also, we don't know everything that went on in the courtroom? Psshh. There are people living for tweets about this shit. The trial was shown on TV. I have to call bullshit on that.

I think it all comes down to jurors watching too much TV. On every episode of CSI and SVU and WTF, there's DNA evidence, a secret cache of pictures of the accused taking self-portraits with the dead body, a written confession hidden in a secret chamber of a hollow walking stick and a bloody murder weapon with fibers from the accused's stunningly unique Himalayan sweater. Jurors think if they don't have all that, they can't convict. But they can.

I also think they misunderstand "reasonable doubt." I was on a jury for a trial a few years ago where the guy was accused of selling pot. Among the evidence were enormous amounts of pot, baggies, twenty little hanging scales, and lists of the people who owed him money. The defense's argument was that he was a really heavy personal user and that the scales were for weighing food on Weight Watchers. One or two jurors really thought that might constitute reasonable doubt. No, dude.

Anyway, I agree that I don't want innocent people jailed. I agree that it would have been awfully nice to have direct evidence. I even agree that it's weird that kids get killed all the time and we don't get this into it. But what happened was wrong, and I think the jury fucked up.

There. It's out of my system. Tomorrow I'll tell you about the fun day we had at the Crocker Art Museum.