If you have turned on a television or radio or god forbid picked up a newspaper in the last two days, all you have seen is Casey Anthony and her acquittal on charges she killed her daughter.
Now, I don’t know if she really did it or not. The evidence in the court of public opinion, which is argued by talking heads and pundits, had the woman convicted in 2008.
Funny thing happened on the way to the death house though, a jury of her peers said, “no, you didn’t prove she did it. Sorry.” So, she gets to go on living and doing it free.
Many people, mostly parents, are furious about this verdict and think Anthony should be lynched anyway. I say, stop complaining – the system did its job. If you want to be mad at somebody be mad at the prosecutors and investigators that blew a case that was begging to be solved.
On his official blog, Grogan's Corner, Dunwoody, Ga. Police Chief Billy Grogan lists six things that are “lessons learned” about the Anthony case, but none of them are critical of how his department’s investigators handled the case. Citing obstacles to conviction like, “the jurors want to know the cause of death,” “ police and prosecutors can only present evidence that is available” and, “jury verdicts should be based of facts not emotion,” Grogan is making it sound like they shouldn’t have had to do anything at all but show up and somehow it’s someone else’s fault that the case was lost.
"In these complex cases, jurors tend to have more confidence in forensic evidence and less confidence in circumstantial evidence. A case such as this is extremely difficult, even in the best of circumstances. It is especially difficult when the circumstances of the case leave you with little real evidence,” Grogan wrote.
Little real evidence? I thought you were supposed to have real evidence to convict somebody. I thought that was the way the system was set up. Yet people want to yelp that justice wasn’t done. Justice was done by the letter of the law as written in the Bill of Rights. What wasn’t done was an effective job by police and prosecutors.
Sometimes the system works the wrong way though, especially when the victim is a child and public outrage demands an arrest, conviction of the innocent is a real possibility, which is as much a crime as acquitting the guilty.
In 2008, Kennedy Brewer was exonerated of a 1995 murder conviction of a three-year-old girl. Even though DNA testing proved Brewer's innocence in 2001, he remained incarcerated for an additional six years not being released until August 2007. The results of the DNA tests which cleared Brewer implicated a man, who later confessed to the murder.
Of course sometimes the evidence comes too late, such as with the case of Cameron Todd Willingham who was convicted in 1992 of the arson murder of his three kids. He was put to death in 2004, but unfortunately, the Texas Forensic Science Commission later established that the evidence was misinterpreted. They also determined that not one bit of the evidence used against him was valid and that the fire really was accidental as Willingham had repeatedly said.
Look, I know that most of the folks in law enforcement and the judicial system are honest upright people who really try to do the job right. But sometimes, some less dedicated or overstretched ones cut corners because of limited resources and manpower or simple apathy.
Maybe, if they could spend a little less time doing pointless things like license checkpoints and busting college kids for misdemeanor weed possession, they would have more time and money to go after the really bad guys and girls out there.
Hey, when it comes right down to it, none of us were in the courtroom or the jury room and we do not have access to the evidence, or lack thereof as it is, so we can only rely on news reporters, who, as I said early on, had Anthony convicted three years ago.
The system said she is innocent, so, she’s innocent. If the system got it wrong, is that somehow worse than if he had been convicted and was actually innocent? I think not.
Only she knows if she killed her child. If she did then I hope there is a hell for her to burn in, if she didn’t then she’s been living in hell for a while now and it’s one she can never leave.
