I’m squarely with Charlotte on the Casey Anthony verdict. It was, as Charlotte says, a tragic miscarriage of justice. And while I agree with Anna’s point that our judicial system is set up to “protect the accused-not the victim,” our system also relies on juries that consider the evidence put before them so that they can render a serious verdict.
In my opinion, this is where this jury failed. This jury wasn’t made up of 12 Angry Men, it was made up of 12 milquetoast, slightly gullible individuals who were clearly in a hurry to get home!
There’s simply no way this jury could have reviewed the mountain of evidence provided to them by the prosecution. They spent only 11 hours deliberating. According to many of the legal scholars commenting on this case, that just isn’t long enough for them to thoroughly review the evidence and both the defense and prosecution complex cases.
Anna asks if this was a matter of the CSI effect, or whether the jury bought Casey’s far-fetched drowning scenario before offering an Occam’s razor-type explanation that the prosecution simply failed to prove its case to the jury. That’s fine and perhaps that’s true but something struck me and very peculiar after the verdict was announced; the jury didn’t hold a press conference. In a case like this with so much media and public interest, that seems odd to me.
Perhaps they know they ignored the evidence. Perhaps they know that they’ll have a tough time answering the media’s questions and explaining away the facts put forth by the prosecution. Perhaps they know they didn’t do their job and they let a murderer walk free.
Perhaps they’re feeling a little bit of that verdict they should have returned…guilty.