I will be the first to admit I failed to hang on every word of this trial from beginning to end. It just wasn’t that important to me. Not that a baby’s death does not merit attention, it does. But the national, and international fascination with this trial and the media obsession was simply not deserved. Lacking anything better to talk about, the media went on a frenzy. Which means that mere mortals were simply powerless to avoid the “in depth” coverage.
But what is amazing to watch as millions obsessed was how the media manipulated emotion and ginned up hatred for this woman based entirely on speculation and conjecture.
Now, I don’t know if Anthony killed her little girl or not, but I am sure she knows what happened.
What I do know for sure is that I have not seen a Judge as incompetent as Belvin Perry since Lance Ito and the O.J. Simpson trials.
From the very beginning, Perry’s rulings gave the Prosecutors every conceivable advantage including a slickly prepared “Hollywood” style video production prepared ostensibly to show forensic evidence that was an obvious attempt to play to the jury’s emotions. Not that the Prosecution (and Defense) do not play to the emotions of any jury, but this particular video purporting to show evidence that Anthony killed her child only highlighted (for me) the complete lack of evidence that the Prosecution was going to present. The video showed little Caylee Anthony morphing into a skull with duct tape over her mouth. This was not evidence, but rather, a total fabrication of what the Prosecution was trying to prove. A fictional reenactment taking Hollywood liberties with the truth. Imagine if the Defense had tried to introduce a video of a chile actor falling in a swimming pool and drowning. Judge Perry would have never let such a video into evidence.
And there were almost daily examples of reasons that a guilty verdict would eventually be overturned.
Those following the case were taken in by the media’s constant analysis of how horrible Casey Anthony was because she danced and partied. Admittedly that is not something most would do if their child were missing, but it proves nothing. Fortunately, the jury was not subjected to the daily demonizing rituals on the 24 hour news channels.
The bottom line is, the prosecution never proved Caylee Anthony was murdered. They were forced to create new and never before used methods to try to stretch the scant evidence to fit the case they ran with. From sniffing air in a trunk to smiley stickers found some distance away.
The burden of proof was on the prosecution. And they had to invent creative ways to try to sway the jury into believing a mother killed her daughter. When you strip away the emotional attempts to play on the jury’s sympathy and the flimflam, sleight of hand ploys, the evidence simply did not prove anything even remotely close to murder.
I am not sure how the jurors actually reacted to this attempt by prosecutors to play them for fools, perhaps we will find out eventually as the money grows for an exclusive, but had I been sequestered for two months for this fictional showboating by a prosecution team that thought they could invent creative3 ways to present evidence that did not exist, I would have been an angry juror.
There was no evidence, absent emotional insanity, to prove the little girl was murdered.
Had the body been found earlier and a cause of death could have been determined by accepted means, there may have been actual evidence of a murder. But there was none.
The danger of a case like this is that Judge Perry lowered the bar for evidence so low that if Casey Anthony were convicted prosecutors would be free to use junk science in every case in Florida from now on.
The larger question in this case is ‘How far out will we let a prosecutor go to convict someone‘? The true danger of convicting Casey Anthony for murder in this case is that the methods and “creative” presentations would become the norm from now on and a lot if innocent people will be sitting in jail based on how creative a prosecutor can get with the evidence. A conviction here would mean that no one would stand a chance, even the innocent, of escaping a conviction on almost anything an overzealous prosecutor wants to prove.
The Duke Lacrosse case should serve as a sobering reminder of how far some prosecutors will go in their ambition to make a name for themselves and rise to higher office.
Did Casey Anthony murder her child? We may never know. But this case tells prosecutors that they still need a real case with real evidence to convict someone.
Justice has yet to be served for little Caylee Anthony, but justice was indeed served for Americans yesterday. We are still innocent until proven guilty – and evidence still matters.
Article written by: Tom White
About Tom White
Tom is a US Navy Veteran, owns an Insurance Agency and is currently an IT Manager for a Virginia Distributor. He has been published in American Thinker, currently writes for the Richmond Examiner as well as Virginia Right! Blog. Tom lives in Hanover County, Va and is involved in politics at every level and is a Recovering Republican who has finally had enough of the War on Conservatives in progress with the Leadership of the GOP on a National Level.
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