Trial By Twitter

I know it's been a long time since I've written but I have been so wrapped up in the Casey Anthony you wouldn't believe it. Now that my jobs at Tulane & UNO have both ended, I have had lots of free time (when not working on translation and job-seeking) to watch the trial on HLN. And post about it on Facebook. And read other ppl's tweets about it (although I haven't gotten a Twitter acct just yet). And watch videos of it on CNN.com. And read what the Orlando Sentinel's website has to say about it. I even became FB friends with Richelle Carey from HLN just so I could read her posts about the trial while I was working on my translation project.

Casey Anthony was accused of murdering her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee.
The trial itself lasted just over a month but Casey Anthony has been on trial in the court of public opinion for about 3 years now, mostly thanks to Nancy Grace's continous harping on "Tot Mom". Miss Anthony was just declared not guilty of all the charges except for providing false information to police officers. Needless to say, my cell phone BLEW UP when this news came in. Naturally I was watching HLN's coverage of the verdict at the time. I see that loads of folks on FB are outraged & I'm sure Nancy Grace is having a fit of apoplexy right about now but my DVR has been on pause since the verdict was announced.

Nancy Grace's show gives her an opportunity to do what she couldn't do when she was a prosecutor: present inflammatory, skewed information to an apathetic public, whom she whips into a frenzy via the repetition of key phrases: "Justice for Caylee" "Tot Mom Went out PARTYING while the baby was missing" "Caylee's body was wrapped up like trash" "Caylee's body was found only 15 houses from the Anthony home!!" "The baby was tested for Ketamine--a DATE RAPE drug!!!!" Never mind that Caylee was tested for EVERY drug, Nancy Grace has to make it out as if Ketamine was the only thing the baby's body was tested for, and it just HAD to be because the police had evidence of the baby being drugged. The fact was & is that they NEVER had solid evidence of Casey Anthony's guilt, only a strange, sad set of circumstances.

I can't claim not to have been affected by all of this media coverage on the case. Based on HLN's night time lineup--Jane Velez-Mitchell, Nancy Grace, & Dr Drew--there was never any doubt that despite our "innocent until proven guilty" principle, HLN believed this woman was as guilty as hell & never really gave much airtime to the Defense's case, except the most outlandish aspects of it. There was plenty of coverage about searches on Casey Anthony's computer (84 I believe) for "chloroform" that were found by some IT expert. However, the fact that these searches didn't show up until a SECOND scan was done on the computer (which took this expert over 12 hours to make work). If I hadn't watched the entire closing arguments (the only time that HLN didn't incessantly break in with commercials, btw) I might have missed that on the 1st search on Casey's computer, the experts found NO mention of chloroform and 84 accesses to Myspace. Now this makes more sense to me. Once you look up how to make chloroform, why would you need to go back 40 times? It is more reasonable to me to expect someone to use myspace 40 times. Never mind that it is not 100% clear whether it was Casey who was actually using the computer at that time. HLN also never mentioned that the original State's Medical Examiner found no evidence of homicide & ONLY focussed on what celebrity Medical Examiner, Dr G (Jan Garavaglia) had to say about Caylee's remains, which had been gnawed on by animals.

But this is not really the point I was trying to make in the first place. Casey Anthony was arrested & accused of murdering her child because Casey Anthony lies. (She made up this whole elaborate fantasy about her Caylee being with a nanny, not to mention some story about a non-existent boyfriend & his children, and plenty more besides). She also steals (from her own grandfather's retirement home fund! Her best friend, Amy's checkbook!). And she ran around acting like a party girl for the 1st 31 days after her daughter went missing!!

But does the fact that someone behave abhorrently make it OK for us to lynch her? Jane Velez-Mitchell made a great point recently when she mentioned that this is the 1st trial to take place via social media. People receive sensationalistic information and then react on FB, Twitter, etc without knowing the whole story. People hate this Casey Anthony woman because she didn't act like we wanted her to. Never mind that she didn't "act" the way we expect a murderer to act--for example, by leaving town, hiding out, or trying to change her identity. At the end of the day though, the state's case really just boiled down to "Don't you just hate her? She was the last person to be seen with the baby, therefore she must have killed the baby, therefore we should put her to death!!"

I thought Casey Anthony's lawyer, Jose Baez, made a lot of mis-steps during this trial--not the least of which being to accuse Casey's dad of molesting her since age 8 in his opening statement--but his closing arguments were little short of genius. He easily poked holes in the State's flimsy case and pointed out how much reasonable doubt there really is where this case is concerned. Once you go beyond the sound bites and really look at the "evidence," there really isn't very much there.