A Serious Comment on Our Legal System. Seriously.

The entire cable news watching world appears to be outraged this week by the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial, at least to judge by the status updates I am having to wade through on Facebook (my kingdom for a subject matter based filter!). The rest of the universe is outraged that the rest of you could deign to judge someone based on slanted news coverage when you weren’t there in the court room. To this latter group I have to say - Are you really surprised people are judgmental? That they make judgments based on sound bites and partial information? You do know that it’s against Facebook’s terms of use to have your own account if you’re still in kindergarten, right?

To the former group, I say “she is obviously guilty!” is not admissible evidence in a court of law.

I did not watch any coverage of this debacle, and I don’t have a dog in this fight. No verdict one way or another was going to bring that little girl back, and ultimately Casey Anthony will have to answer to a higher power than a jury of her peers for all her sins, whether she committed those she was accused of or not. That said, whatever your outrage de jour happens to be, please observe your legal system in action and take note.

Juries in a criminal trial are instructed that they can only convict someone if the evidence demonstrates guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Not all doubt, mind you, but beyond all reasonable doubt. That is a high burden. In the United States, the accused are presumed innocent until proven guilty. To use a completely unnecessary football metaphor, think of this as giving the defense a touchdown and a two-point conversion before the clock starts. Why? Why make it so hard to send such obviously guilty people to jail? Because going to jail is a big deal. It’s depriving someone of their freedom - that nebulous concept our country was supposedly founded on, and that we just got done celebrating with hot dogs and fireworks a few days ago. The theory underlying our entire system of justice is that a few guilty individuals going free is a small price to pay to avoid depriving the innocent of their freedom unjustly. So the burden is on the prosecution in every criminal matter to overcome reasonable doubt. Defense attorneys are there to make sure the prosecution meets its burden within the bounds of the law, and where reasonable doubt exists, to point it out.

What the jury said with its verdict in this case is that the prosecution didn’t overcome reasonable doubt. Whether it was because the prosecution simply didn’t have good evidence or because the defense successfully persuaded the jury that reasonable doubt existed in spite of the evidence in the record, we may never know. But here is something else to remember - juries are made up of humans. I’m not saying they did or didn’t get it right in this case, but juries are unpredictable, and pulling the trigger on sending someone to prison is hard. In a criminal trial, you pretty much have to get everything right to land a conviction. The next time you think some scumbag got off a little too easy with a plea deal or a corporation makes some sweetheart settlement in a big injury case, just remember that it could have gone to the jury, and no one knows what might happen there.

Final thought - cool it on the rhetoric, and think a little about how our system is supposed to work. It did what it was supposed to do in this case, even if the result wasn’t what you wanted or what the incredibly slanted mainstream media (right and left) led you to believe was the correct result. It does what it’s supposed to do in most cases.

Except the OJ case. That verdict still pisses me off.