Casey Anthony acquitted

last updated 8 January 2015

In a verdict that shocked millions of Americans who had followed the case for more than a year, unmarried mother Casey Anthony was acquitted of murdering her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, so she could be free to live as a single woman. The prosecution presented a strong circumstantial case, including the 25-year-old Anthony’s failure to report her daughter missing for more than a month while she went clubbing and got a tattoo that said “the good life” in Italian. There were indications that Anthony had researched how to make chloroform, and prosecutors argued that duct tape found over the nose and mouth of Caylee’s decomposed body was incontrovertible evidence of murder. But the defense posited an alternative scenario, saying the toddler drowned in a pool and a panicked Casey enlisted her father’s help to dispose of the body. Juror Jennifer Ford said she and other jurors cried and were “sick to their stomachs’’ over acquitting Anthony, but felt “there was not enough evidence’’ to convict her.

This verdict was “far more shocking” than the acquittal of O.J. Simpson, said former Simpson prosecutor Marcia Clark in Theâ€‹DailyBeast.com. None of the defense’s proffered reasons to doubt Anthony’s guilt were remotely reasonable, but “that distinction can get lost” in the jury room. As a result, a “25-year-old sociopath” now walks free, said Andrea Peyser in the New York Post. Casey Anthony was convicted only of lying to police—“one would assume, about killing her daughter”—and could be released immediately, since she’s already spent three years in jail. “She never shed a tear” for her dead baby. As cable TV’s Nancy Grace said, “Somewhere out there tonight, the devil is dancing.”

Grace and her cable cohorts are guilty of “massive overkill,” said Howard Kurtz in TheDailyBeast.com. Caylee’s murder wouldn’t have been covered at all if Anthony hadn’t been “white, middle-class, and attractive.” The media circus has exploited this “tragedy until it becomes entertainment.” And that explains the nation’s outrage, said Alexandra Petri in The Washington Post. An American public raised on Law and Order episodes can’t accept that after months of hearing Nancy Grace denounce Anthony as a callous, evil murderer, we were cheated out of our guilty verdict. “Justice? Injustice? It’s a show, and we didn’t like the ending.”