JD's Docket: A Brief Response to Casey Anthony's Verdict

"Unbelievable." "An outrage!" "The Justice System is a joke."

Those were just some of the many posts by people on my Facebook talking about Casey Anthony's  not guilty verdict.

I hardly consider myself an expert in this case as I did not follow it throughout any part of the trial.  However, as a law student, I feel a certain duty to form some sort of opinion on this highly publicized legal story.

Casey Anthony After a few Too Many

The facts of the case are horrific. Whether it was murder or an accident, the life of Caylee Anthony  was unnecessarily cut short and someone is responsible for this negligent act.

The prosecution did an excellent job of portraying Casey as a terrible mom that loved to party and apparently could have cared less that her child had died.  Plus, the bevy of lies told by Anthony to the police raised even more doubts about her character.  

However, the defense's story painted a version where Caylee accidentally drowned and Anthony's warped sense of reality caused her to wait over a month before revealing what had happen to her child.  This planted invaluable seeds of reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury. With the burden of proof resting heavily on the prosecution, they could not substantially prove anything other than that Anthony was a profuse liar with parenting issues.  Their case relied strictly on circumstantial evidence, which has a tendency to confuse the common juror.  

Unlike the rest of the world, the jurors were probably just like me, unaware that this dreadful act had even occurred. They probably were not glued to the many opinions about Anthony on CNN, Fox News, Twitter, and the such.  Like most people doing their civic duty, they hopefully followed the juror instructions which provide them with the specific elements that classified an act as murder.

Marrying the facts to the law was the first thing that I learned at law school and this seems like an excellent example of that early lesson.  The jury was provided with facts by both the prosecution and the defense.  They then compared those facts to Florida's murder law and decided that there wasn't enough there for a conviction.

The jurors are not the ones to blame for letting this possible murderer off of the hook. The State's lawyers failed to make a clear case that Anthony was truly guilty of intentionally killing her child.  If the undeniable facts were there, then it would have been a slam dunk.  But apparently they were not.

It can be difficult to take the side of a possible murderer, especially when the death of a child is involved. However, every citizen deserves their day in court and to be unbiasedly judged by a jury of their peers.

Did Anthony get away with murder? Probably. However, the "smoking gun" was never found, giving the jury reasonable doubt, and leaving us with the illusion that justice was not served.