To be honest we did not follow the Casey Anthony trial on television.
While the death of a two year child is a tragedy we simply were not interested in a case far away in Florida involving people we did not know and whom we would not care to meet.
Simply put there was no news interest in the sordid case so we tuned out and turned off.
What to pick up our ears was the almost universal vilification of the jury over it’s acquittal of Anthony by virtually every talking head “legal expert” on the boob tube.
Pity we have the jury system, they all seemed to imply. A bunch of rubes made a stupid decision.
Well in defense of rubes let us say that reporters, lawyers and trail experts are about the stupidest bunch of nincompoops out there.
We know because once we numbered among them.
We like to think that we have reformed but who knows?
In our years covering trials we have found one inviolate truth.
A lawyer first and only reason in talking to a reporter is to somehow benefit his or her client. There is no second no third reason to talk to the press.
We also found that often times the more loquacious an attorney is to the press and the public the weaker is his case.
We have also found that losing attorneys are more often than not ready to blame just about anyone or anything for their loss except themselves. Their most frequent whipping boys are of course the juries. And jurors who have much less practice in pointing fingers usually come across as kind of dumb in post trial interviews.
But in defense of juries they seldom get it wrong.
We say that confidently after posting dozens of trials on our website over the past three years.
We say that despite occasionally being on the bloody band wagon yearning for a conviction only to be astounded when what we were told and what we believed was a slam dunk case bounced off the rim into the not guilty zone.
After we got over being astounded we went back and watched the trial.
The whole trial not just snippets.
And to our astonishment when we asked ourselves if we could send a man to prison for the rest of his life based on the evidence presented we found we could not.
Yeah it would have been a fine morality tale if that “lying slut” Casey Anthony got the death penalty for the murder of her daughter.
But the simple truth is the prosecution did not prove its case.
The verdict was “not guilty” not “innocent”.
Did she kill her daughter? Maybe, but the jurors were clear that they weren’t ready to send her to prison or to take her life because she was a lying slut.
They took their responsibility seriously and they did well.
Despite what any lawyer or talking head says, our jury system is not the weakest link in our system of justice. Rather it is the backbone of it.
While the collective IQ of a jury my not be as high as the collective IQ of the defense, prosecution and the judge, a jury’s moral compass is without exception truer than the gaggle of attorneys who are being paid to champion one set of facts over another.
So thank you jurors, you make us all proud.