State of Florida v Casey Marie Anthony

My pre­dic­tion: (please for­give typos, work­ing on tiny lap­top wth weird keyboard)

1.) she will be found guilty of mur­der 1^st degree

2.) ver­dict will only take a few days

3.) pnealty phase… no death penalty

Okay, my 12-​​year-​​old tech assis­tant (he had a birth­day a cou­ple of weeks ago) came over on his skate­board and fixed me up with a key­board some­what jammed with toast crumbs, an old mon­i­tor with a black band at the top, and a mouse that seems to be miss­ing one ear… all hooked up to my shiny new laptop.

So I’m all set.

Now.. about Casey Anthony… I con­sider this case very top­i­cal since (like the DSK case) it involves soci­etal judge­ment on a “bad girl.” I’m also a bit dis­turbed by the incon­sis­tency of my own response. I tend to speak in defense of DSK’s accuser, because even if she’s a “bad woman” I think she is enti­tled to due process. But I have no sym­pa­thy for Casey Anthony. None. I think she killed her child with pre­med­i­ta­tion, and she should spend the rest of her mis­er­able life in jail.

I guess the rea­son I feel dif­fer­ently about the two cases is:

1.) Casey Anthony DID receive due process
2.) There is a 2-​​year-​​old child involved

If I were on the jury, I would say I have been con­vinced beyond a rea­son­able doubt of Casey Anthony‘s guilt.

Max.. I was con­vinced by the judge’s charge to the jury today. In FL, if a child dies while being abused, that is con­sid­ered first degree mur­der. The trunk of the car where her body was trans­ported held traces of chlo­ro­form. Her body when dis­cov­ered had duct tape tightly cov­er­ing the nose and mouth. Either thing (sedat­ing with chlo­ro­form or tap­ing with no breath­ing holes) would con­sti­tute child abuse.

The mother was the care­giver at the time and her sub­se­quent behav­ior, in my opin­ion, points beyond rea­son­able doubt to guilt rather than innocence.

Max.. the pros­e­cu­tion proved to my sat­is­fac­tion that soft-​​tissue DNA degrades rapidly in an out­door set­ting. I think the whole defense in this case is smoke and mir­rors, like the OJ case. They had a guilty client, and their only recourse was to baf­fle the jury with BS.

The fact remains, there WAS a dead child. There WAS a skull. There was a mother who knew what hap­pened to the child, and who man­u­fac­tured a num­ber of lies to explain her dis­ap­pear­ance. I think the damn­ing, indis­putable evi­dence in this case is (to quote Sher­lock Holmes) the dog that didn’t bark. The mother who didn’t call 911 to get help for her dying child, who didn’t con­tact the police, who didn’t tell the truth when every­body was search­ing for her child.

I can’t man­u­fac­ture any pos­si­ble sce­nario in my mind that points to any­thing but guilt. There­fore I am con­vinced beyond a rea­son­able doubt.

If you and I were both on the jury, it would prob­a­bly end in vio­lence

In Feb­ru­ary of this year, Dale Larkin was found guilty of first degree mur­der in the death of his wife who drowned in the bath­tub. The case con­sisted entirely of cir­cum­stan­tial rather than direct evi­dence. This was the instruc­tion to the jury:

When the evi­dence is made up entirely of cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence, then before you would be jus­ti­fied in find­ing the defen­dant guilty, you must find that all the essen­tial facts are con­sis­tent with the hypoth­e­sis of guilt, as that is to be com­pared with all the facts proved; the facts must exclude every other rea­son­able the­ory or hypoth­e­sis except that of guilt; and the facts must estab­lish such a cer­tainty of guilt of the defen­dant as to con­vince the mind beyond a rea­son­able doubt that the defen­dant is the one who com­mit­ted the offense. It is not nec­es­sary that each par­tic­u­lar fact should be proved beyond a rea­son­able doubt if enough facts are proved to sat­isfy the jury beyond a rea­son­able doubt of all the facts nec­es­sary to con­sti­tute the crime charged. Before a ver­dict of guilty is jus­ti­fied, the cir­cum­stances, taken together, must be of a con­clu­sive nature and ten­dency, lead­ing on the whole to a sat­is­fac­tory con­clu­sion and pro­duc­ing in effect a moral cer­tainty that the defen­dant, and no one else, com­mit­ted the offense.

Jean.. Larkin was inter­est­ing in that the trial was 7 years after the mur­der, based on exhum­ing remains. (Part of the cir­cum­stan­tial evi­dence con­sisted of large insur­ance poli­cies Larkin had taken out on his wife prior to her death.) It was in TN which does have the death penalty but has only used if twice in the past 35 years. Larkin was not fac­ing the death penalty.

But Casey Anthony will have the same jury for the penalty phase (they remain sequestered until that’s over, too.) So they have the option of find­ing 1^st degree if the duct tape and the many searches for “chlo­ro­form” on the fam­ily com­puter con­vince them of pre-​​meditation… but they can still opt for the lesser sen­tence later.

Wow, I sure got that one wrong.

The only thing I can fig­ure is that we in the pub­lic got a lot more info than the jury did. But shiloh is right, unfor­tu­nately, about pos­si­ble anger against the jury.

I also think how much anger there will be against Casey Anthony her­self. I think she will not have a pleas­ant life. As Gerry Spence said after the OJ trial… “You can’t beat the big one.” Mean­ing, of course, that peo­ple who com­mit mur­der don’t ever really “get away with it”… no mat­ter what the jury says.

On reflec­tion, I think this case is a good exam­ple of how destruc­tive the death penalty is to any sys­tem of jus­tice. This should NEVER have been charged as a cap­i­tal case, and the fact that it was (as Jean pointed out yes­ter­day) no doubt influ­enced the jury’s decision-​​making.

Cap­i­tal cases cost more to try, take longer to appeal, adju­di­cate, sen­tence and carry out, and cause fre­quent mis­car­riages of jus­tice, wherein inno­cent peo­ple are killed by the state.. .and guilty peo­ple go free because juries are reluc­tant to assess the ulti­mate penalty.