Trial by media

If the chloroform don’t fit…

It seems that the entire world was stunned by the outcome in the Casey Anthony trial.  Anthony was accused of murdering her two-year old daughter Caylee about three years ago.  The press already had Casey drawn, quartered, and hung on gibbets all around Orlando. What was reported, as usual, was rife with individual reporters’ opinions. They reported those things that they felt were important, and not necessarily what the jury thought was important.

It’s strange how juries work. Having sat through several capital and first degree murder trials, I can tell you that it’s sometimes impossible to know what a jury is thinking. There are groups of people, mostly psychiatrists, who are paid enormous sums for “reading” juries and also for helping to coach defendants and others for when the appear on the stand.  And then, in this case, you have to suspect that the prosecution may have been influenced by the public hue and cry over the apparent murder of a two-year-old and perhaps brought the case forward when it needed more time to mature.

I can tell you that whether the victim is two or 10, there is always public hue and cry when murder involves a child.  One of the capital murder cases I covered back in the day involved a 10-year-old. It was extraordinary, although once they caught the bad guy there wasn’t really much hope for him. He was a thoroughly useless specimen of the human race and got what he deserved, although he might have deserved it a bit sooner than he eventually got his one way ticket to Ol’ Sparky in Greenville.

In that case there was tons of evidence that pointed directly at the defendant. Apparently in the Anthony case there was little or none. It is extremely hard to make a circumstantial evidence case stand up. And, when you add into it the fanfare and high profile character of this case, the difficulty in prosecuting it expands geometrically.

By comparison, in the case of Everett Lee Mueller, who was put to death for killing 10-year-old Charity Powers, the prosecution allowed five days for the entire trial and jury deliberation. It was over in four days, and only took a matter of hours for the jury to return the death penalty.

The Anthony trial was an online and on TV spectacle for the past six weeks. It was nearly impossible not to hear something about the Anthony case even before the jury trial started.  And for all intent and purposes the media already had Casey filleted and ready for a quick trip down (up?) to Florida’s renowned Death Row super highway.

But juries make those decisions and not the media. The media always seem to want to impose their opinions nowadays, instead of just reporting the facts. You don’t have to travel very far to see that kind of reporting in action.  Pay attention to the adjectives used to describe things, or better yet, if you can do such a thing, read the tone of the writing. There has been a change in the manner in which reporting is done. It is now okay to take sides, and also to help out the side the reporter favors or thinks is right.

In the case of high-profile murder trials, it’s difficult to make up your mind if you only have the newspaper, TV, and Internet reports to go by. They all seem to be focused on the same thing, and more often than not, it’s the wrong thing. There’s nothing like sitting through a capital murder trial to get a feel for what is really being presented.  The jury’s perspective is often way different from that of the audience. For one thing, the audience is not privy to the interaction of the jury at all. We get their report, but we have no idea of the deliberations. We also have no idea what the jury thinks about the presentations by the prosecution and the defense teams.

Believability has a lot to do with how the case turns out.  And ultimately, which pieces of evidence ended up being the critical pieces won’t be known for some time. There will be speculation.  Already, the chloroform information has been brought forward, and the defense team’s ability to spotlight alarming things like incest, sexual abuse, and other seemingly off-topic issues may have clouded the facts in the case.

But in the end, we have to trust the jury. The jury is a group of people like us, a jury of peers.  We have to trust that they made the right decision in this case, as we have had to in many cases before this.  Certainly, we are all swayed when justice for a nearly three-year old child is involved. But the jury is charged with looking at the facts and applying common sense to the evidence presented.  It’s the system of justice we Americans believe in, and therefore the one we will follow.

Still, we can’t help but feel that Caylee in some way was cheated.  In the death of a young child, we want to be able to blame someone, to make someone pay.  So we have to trust the jury did their job.  We have to believe that what they decided was in fact the right decision.  Still, it doesn’t help much.  Maybe defense attorney Jose Baez said it best, "While we're happy for Casey, there are no winners in this case."