The blatant slut-shaming that the prosecution relied on for motive was/is absurd. Her desire to enjoy being young shouldn’t be anyone’s fucking business.

If the prosecution had focused in on the good stuff they had - the duct tape, the winnie the pooh blanket, the band-aids, the computer search - and not on some bullshit desire to slut-shame they would have fared better.

PS. And fuck all of those on twitter who seem more interested in making sure all of us know that Casey Anthony is a dirty slut and she deserves to die and oh yeah shame on her for killing her newborn daughter too. You all disgust me.

I’ll have to check out that Bill James’ book, sounds interesting. All I knew about James outside of this is that he’s a highly esteemed baseball expert and he’s the guy who coined the word “sabermetrics” (derived from the Society for American Baseball Research) in reference to the scientific analysis of baseball statistics.

Regarding the Anthony verdict, my gut instinct is that there is a strong possibility that she did in fact kill her daughter, but nevertheless, the state failed to remove all reasonable doubt in prosecuting the case. A lot of people have misinterpreted the jury’s verdict as an absolute declaration of her innocence, but one juror has already stepped forward and refuted that contention and specifically said that the jury did not declare Ms. Anthony innocent. My guess is that for at least a few of the jurors, they probably felt in their guts that there was a strong possibility that she did actually kill her daughter, but since verdicts aren’t supposed to be decided based on one’s “gut instinct”, they had to rely on the available evidence, which came up short in proving her guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

Just a hunch, but I think if the state hadn’t tried to nail her with first degree murder with the possibility of a death sentence, the outcome may have been different.

As for the slut-shaming tactic, I think the prosecution completely blew it, because all they really proved was that she was a 20-something young woman that liked to party and may not have been the most responsible mother. The fact that she likes sex and may not be winning a Mother of the Year award anytime soon does not prove that she’s a murderer. And I say that as someone who thinks there’s a strong possibility that she did actually kill her child.

But again, juries aren’t supposed to base their decisions on gut instincts, and to that end, I think the jury in this case did exactly what they were expected to do.

Not surprisingly, several people I “know” on Facebook and other social media outlets were outraged about the verdict and declared our legal & criminal justice systems to be “broken” because of it. At least a few were right-wing and right-leaning types who claim to revere the Constitution; well, folks, jury trials are right there in the Sixth Amendment. Why do you hate freedom?

Of course, to be fair, people of varied political views often speak of the broken criminal justice system (or systems, if you want to give a nod to federalism) and certainly for many people in this country, it has worked in a profoundly flawed fashion. But it’s not the institution of juries that are the problem, IMHO.

“If the prosecution had focused in on the good stuff they had - the duct tape, the winnie the pooh blanket, the band-aids, the computer search” 

Hmm, those are the things the prosecution focused on. Did you watch the trial, or are you relying on the media reports of the trial? Nancy Grace and Co. may have been slut-shaming, but not the prosecution.

I got the feeling that she might be guilty, but I wasn’t sure of what.  Maybe she murdered the kid in cold blood, or maybe did something really stupid and the kid died.  Either way, the possibility of the death penalty for a crime one is unlikely to repeat is just stupid.  Casey Anthony is not a menace to society.  We give serial killers the death penalty.  How awful would it be to put a young woman away for life or put her to death for something that she might not have done or that might have been an accident.

And no, there wasn’t a lot of good evidence.  Being a party girl is not evidence of anything except being a party girl. 

If she has another kid who mysteriously ends up dead, then we can pull out the pitchforks.  Right now I think shrugging shoulders is most appropriate.

Tangentially, Matt Cherette at Gawker coined the perfect name for people who do what the deplorable Nancy Grace does for a living: “Grief Pornographer”.

Not that I had much use for Headline News or any use for Nancy Grace prior to yesterday, but their wall-to-wall endless 24-7 coverage of this trial over the past month leads me to believe they should just change their name to the Casey Anthony Is An Evil Slutty Murderer Network.

How Ms. Grace never managed to get herself disbarred at some point in her legal career amazes me. She very clearly deplores the constitutional mandate that all criminal suspects are to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. I’m quite surprised her head didn’t literally explode on live television yesterday after the verdict was read.

If people really think that a grave injustice was done yesterday in Casey Anthony’s acquittal, they should be mad at the prosecution for going for Murder One with such a flimsy case that relied entirely on circumstantial evidence. Try her for just aggravated manslaughter and I bet she gets convicted. I’m aware that aggravated manslaughter was one of the charges, but I think that if it had been the primary charge without being linked to a murder one charge, it would have been a lot easier for the prosecution to get a guilty verdict.

Yeah, they just overreached; their evidence was all circumstantial. They couldn’t establish how the kid died, but they went for capital murder? The mom totally did it, of course, but how could they prove something like that?

Bon, your feeling seems to echo that of the jury’s.  The jurors seem to think the defense’s counter-theory was plausible enough, and they don’t seem nuts or anything.  I think it is in fact plausible that a very young mother might just lose her mind over a dead baby and not act right.  I don’t think that’s what happened, but I could easily see that introducing enough doubt.

Yeah, I haven’t really been following the case, but from what I had heard it just didn’t seem like the prosecution made that whole “beyond a reasonable doubt” thing.  She probably did or knows something, but that isn’t proof.

But the slut shaming and the “being a bad mother is obviously evidence of murder” that has been going around is just amazingly ridiculous.  I’ve had to bite my tongue about that so much over the past day and a half that it isn’t even funny.  I even pissed off my own mom when I basically told her what Amanda said @9.

James is an interesting guy.  Most of the book is a meandering and entertaining history, but he has some really interesting digressions about the flaws in our legal system, especially the ways that the actual structure of trials has changed dramatically, but we haven’t really modernized well enough the expectations on the jury on how to weigh evidence.  He also argues for fixing the protocols for how evidence is introduced so that it’s more about relevance (physical evidence, alibis, a more accurate gauge of how well a suspect is identified) and less towards conjecture about a person’s character basied on largely irrelevant information, i.e. suggesting sluttiness inclines someone to murder when most sluts don’t murder and there’s no reason to believe they murder more than non-sluts.

James also has some interesting observations about how early choices in a criminal investigation can completely fuck it up, as someone accidentally gets invested in one narrative and completely misses critical evidence that would blow the case wide open.  His theory, for instance, that Sam Shepard hired a killer to help him kill his wife makes perfect sense, and is something the cops probably could have thought of but for a few initial problems in the early investigation that shut them off to that possibility.

The duct tape around the mouth seems like pretty ironclad evidence of foul play. If she’d drowned accidentally, or died of any other natural cause, why the tape? That said, the tape doesn’t prove that Casey Anthony was the killer, nor that the killing was a premeditated murder. So, the jury probably made the right decision.

The slut-shaming thing really gets to me.  Whenever someone in the media points out her partying, I think about a handful of friends of mine that had children at 18, 19 or 20 and continued to party. Yes, they left their kids with their parents much of the time, but none of them were ready to become mothers.  Like Casey Anthony, these friends felt pressure from their families to have the children and not give them up for adoption.  However, if Casey Anthony killed her daughter, and with all of the lying, I think she could be a sociopath or a psychopath.

Trying to shake off douchechills from the assumption that feminism equates with “supporting” Casey Anthony.

kitten parade @ 14:

My parents were 19 when I was born and had three kids by the time they were 23.  They didn’t stop partying just because they had three very young daughters—we had babysitters and when a sitter couldn’t be found, we were instructed to stay in our room and just not come out unless there was an emergency.  And I don’t want to say that my parents were bad parents, because they absolutely were not and my sisters and I all turned out well and are really close to our parents and each other, but they clearly weren’t ready to have children at the time that they did *and* they clearly didn’t see why having children of their own meant that they had to grow up entirely themselves, either.

But when I was talking to my mom last night and she was going on and on about how no mother would ever party as much as Casey Anthony clearly did and how that absolutely indicated that she *must* have done something to that poor baby, I pointed out the hard partying that had gone on when I was small and that if something had happened to one of us, then by her logic my mom’s lifestyle during my very young childhood evidence that she would necessarily had something to do with it.  And while the most likely explanation is that Casey Anthony probably killed her child, or at least was involved in some way with the death of her child, her love of partying was not evidence of such.  Mom was *not* happy with me over that one at all.

I agree that the aspects of the coverage of this case which have focused on Casey Anthony’s behavior (or perceived behavior or perceived character) have been pretty sorry.  And while I hate being a stick-in-the-mud, I want to clarify something: don’t get hung up on the term “circumstantial evidence.”  Legal laypersons (and many attorneys) find it easy to misunderstand what this term means.

All evidence other than eyewitness testimony (technically known as “direct evidence”) is “circumstantial evidence.”  All scientific and physical evidence is circumstantial evidence.  The evidence we have that the earth orbits the sun is circumstantial evidence.  There are not two kinds of evidence, strictly speaking; there are two classifications of relevant evidence.

It is not helpful to describe the evidence in any case as “just circumstantial.”  The official comment to the Federal Rules of Evidence states that circumstantial evidence is “just as probative” as direct evidence.  As a practical matter, it’s usually more probative in cases like this, since direct witnesses lie or have mistaken recollections, etc.  Stating that physical or inferential evidence is “just circumstantial” is not more accurate than stating that evolution via natural selection is “just a theory.”

Sorry for stepping onto my lawyer/didact’s soapbox.  As with most everybody else, I agree with Amanda that, based on everything we know, meaning all the relevant evidence taken together with reasonable inferences from that evidence, it seems likely that Casey Anthony had some substantial role in (or at a minimum, knowledge of) the death of her daughter, Caylee.  Not because Casey Anthony is a slut or got a tattoo or participated in some leering contest, but because that seems to be the direction that the evidence points.

Florida is the home to local events that go national in which people “force” you to care about, like the Terri Schiavo thing.  To me it seems like some people wish for show trials and anything other than “guilty” is somehow a failure of the system.  And while it’s terrible that some criminals go free, it is 100 times worse when innocent people go to jail or worse, get executed.

Yeah, this was my reaction to the whole case, that they really just didn’t have the evidence and coming up with arguments like “and maybe she did it because her daughter was getting old enough to tell her grandparents about all of Mom’s boyfriends, she had to shut her up permanently!” (these were the closing arguments) was really, really flimsy. They couldn’t prove how she died, and waved that away with “we’ll probably never know how she died.” Isn’t that kind of what a murder case hinges on? All her lying did was prove her an unreliable witness which threw enough doubt on everything else.
I do think it is entirely possible that she killed her, whether through direct or indirect action. I just don’t think the evidence was there for 1st degree murder, and am inclined to think the jury agreed. Not that they thought she was a super awesome mommy and gave her an award on the subject.

This doesn’t stop people (read comments nowhere, guys) from declaring this a travesty of justice, like if the crime involves a cute enough victim then no evidence should be required! Innocent until proven guilty doesn’t apply to this case, because young mothers! Or something!

Something that I find myself utterly disgusted by but not the least bit surprised by is Rush Limbaugh trying to politicize this by saying that liberals shouldn’t be upset about the death of 2 year old Caylee Anthony since we’re already huge fans of killing babies who haven’t been born yet. Nevermind the fact that there’s a world of difference between a two year old child and and embryo or a blastocyst.

I remember turning on Headline News last summer and seeing Nancy Grace nattering on about poor dead Caylee. You’d think Grace was her godmother with the way that she was going on about “Justice for Caylee.” And I didn’t have the faintest clue what she was talking about. Meanwhile, there was something about a dutch guy being arrested in Peru that had her absolutely frothing at the mouth and I realized…. there is a completely different news cycle out there. I can get that there are people who don’t follow politics as closely as I do, and maybe I don’t follow the more current-eventy stuff (like oil spills and wars and earthquakes etc) as closely as I could, but I realized that there is a whole demographic out there that warrant their own channel that aren’t even following anything resembling the news: they follow this emotional muckraking shit that passes for news. I mean, say what you want about Fox News and their propensity to make up bullshit, at least it orbits the current events/political sphere. Headline News is like the InTouch magazine of cable news networks. If you actually know who Amber and Chloe and Vinny are, chances are Headline News is your go-to source for cable news. And Nancy Grace is your president.

Sorry for stepping onto my lawyer/didact’s soapbox.  As with most everybody else, I agree with Amanda that, based on everything we know, meaning all the relevant evidence taken together with reasonable inferences from that evidence, it seems likely that Casey Anthony had some substantial role in (or at a minimum, knowledge of) the death of her daughter, Caylee.

No need to apologize, I appreciate the clarification, as I am one of the people who apparently didn’t know the precise definition of circumstantial evidence. I think what people generally meant, or at least what I generally meant, in reference to “circumstantial evidence” is that there was no DNA or fingerprint evidence which could be traced directly back to Casey Anthony. And even the Google searches for chloroform couldn’t be traced directly to Casey, as they were done on a computer used by the whole family. I think the point is that there was no real smoking gun in this case. There was no evidence presented that any reasonable jury member could look at and say, “Yup, that definitely proves she did it.”

Nevermind the fact that there’s a world of difference between a two year old child and and embryo or a blastocyst.

You mean like how you can hire someone to take care of the two-year -old for the night if you need a break?

Suddenly I’m having an image of a new market opening up—fetus-sitters!

I recommend the post on this case on Lawyers, Guns & Money, which discusses the fact that many people got hung up on how Anthony didn’t grieve properly. 

I haven’t been able to take Nancy Grace even remotely seriously, even by the low standards of tv blowhards, ever since she was screaming up a storm about how terrible it was that the guys who were suspected of killing Natalee Holloway were released because the police in Aruba didn’t have any evidence.  While Katrina was in the process of destroying New Orleans.  You’re complaining that the police in another country let someone go, because they didn’t have any evidence, which is what they’re supposed to do, who may have killed one person, while there was something actively killing a whole lot of people.  I have to think of Kristen Wiig’s impression in order to not get stabby thinking about her.

Will have to check out that book.  I avoided coverage as much as I could, even wrote to the Today Show years ago to beg them to cover the latest missing adorable kid, since those unfortunately, are never in short supply.  Apparently, she’s the first mother since Medea to be suspected of killing her own kid.  Though, the fact that the father is unknown is news to me just now.  Had vaguely wondered why there wasn’t a grieving father being interviewed every other hour.  Missed a lot of the slut shaming that was phrased in the “polite” news as “she liked to party” and I never made the connection from the euphemism that it meant “she’s a slut.”

One fact you may be interested in (which was alluded to in different comment).

Casey Anthony did not want to be a mother. She got pregnant on accident and her mother pressured her to not have an abortion and then not put Caylee up for adoption.

Obviously, this + the happy partying afterwards is used as evidence of why she MUST have been involved in her daughter’s death. (i.e. She killed her *unwanted* kid to get her life back.)

That really doesn’t prove anything, but, even if that is true, the take away should be <u>that’s why women shouldn’t be forced to have kids they don’t want</u>.

And, alternately, it could go to the defense’s theory. Caylee died in an accident, and Casey covered it up and got on with her life.

If there is a feminist narrative here, it may very well be the clash of silly fantasies about how young women who are forced to give birth will totes love their ‘unexpected’ “bundles of joy” and will “grow up” and be wonderful mommies, and the reality of how young women actually tend to react to forced motherhood.

Besides the misogyny aspect, conservatives use the abortion issue to pretend they have the moral high ground on an issue.  They are sick of being the “bad guy” on every issue, so people like Limbaugh use the “at least we support the unborn” card even though they don’t.

Suddenly I’m having an image of a new market opening up—fetus-sitters!

I believe there’s a legal requirement that sitters occasionally check in on their charge once in a while.  the mother might object.

And on the same day Casey Anthony was acquitted, a Canadian man who said he stabbed his two kids to death because he was upset at his wife’s affair was also acquitted.  Obviously all the bitch’s fault.

I’m really shocked that she got acquitted. I thought the slut shaming would be enough to convict her.  Look at Cynthia Sommer. She was convicted of murdering her husband because she cheated on him and got breast implants. After nearly three years in jail, prosecution admitted that the tests that found arsenic were wrong, and she was released.

If the prosecution’s key argument for guilt is that the defendant behaved inappropriately after the death of a family member, it’s an infallible sign that the prosecution is bullshit.  That kind of argument is deployed mostly against women, but has been used against men on occasion—see the apalling Cameron Todd Wilingham case.

What heaventree at #17 said!  I’d like to repeat it again because one of my pet peeves is when people say that evidence in a case is “just circumstantial.”  This is a pet peeve of mine because lawyers will sometimes exploit this idea that a circumstantial case is necessarily a weak case and then other lawyers (like me) have to work double time in front of a jury to make sure they understand that’s not the case.

Circumstantial evidence can be extremely powerful.  The classic example given often given in jury instructions is that if you see someone walk through your front door wearing a wet raincoat and shaking out an umbrella, you can be pretty damn sure that it was just raining if you didn’t see the rain falling yourself. 

Of course, in this case, it appears that the circumstantial evidence was not strong enough to exclude other reasonable possibilities besides Casey Anthony murdering her kid.  I’m with Lindsey.  The duct tape seems like pretty strong evidence that Caylee was murdered but it doesn’t follow that Casey was the murderer.  She could have been lying to the police to cover for someone else.

And people keep beating me to it.  What rea at #30 said.  My other pet peeve is when crime shows focus on an alleged murderer’s “inappropriate reaction” after the death of the victim.  Who is to say that clubbing isn’t a way to cope with the stress of having a missing child?

This idea of an “appropriate” reaction to the death or disappearance of a loved one scares me a bit.  If anyone close to me dies under mysterious circumstances, I don’t know that I would necessarily be sobbing and crying.  I would more likely just go numb, not be able to absorb the reality of it, and just act as I normally would.  And then some cop would be saying, “Hmmmm . . . . very suspicious.  She’s not acting the way I would expect a grief stricken widow to act.”

Heaven, can you point to where I got hung up on the term “circumstantial evidence”?  I don’t think I even used it.  I realize you have a prepackaged rant on this, but I don’t think it applies.  My argument was, in comments, that the defense offered a decent counternarrative and the jury’s feeling that it introduced reasonable doubt is fair.

Heaven, can you point to where I got hung up on the term “circumstantial evidence”?  I don’t think I even used it.  I realize you have a prepackaged rant on this, but I don’t think it applies.  My argument was, in comments, that the defense offered a decent counternarrative and the jury’s feeling that it introduced reasonable doubt is fair.

It was always my impression that the father of Casey Anthony and the father of Caylee Anthony were one and the same.

This case has been pretty much inescapable if you live anywhere in Florida.  It is difficult not to remind people whenever they get too frothy about it that it is literally impossible to fuck so many dudes that your baby spontaneously drops dead from it.  See also: broke, mentally ill, irresponsible, addicted, etc.  If you’re down to “She drank too much, had been prescribed prozac, and whored around a lot” as evidence for your belief that a defendant killed her roommate/coworker/baby, you should probably rethink it just a little.

Amanda, I don’t think Heavens’ comments about circumstantial evidence were directed at you.  Commenters #7 and #8 said the prosecutors overreached and the case was flimsy because the case was only circumstantial.  Heaven was responding to that, as was I.

It’s good to see there’s another jury besides the one I served on recently that holds the” she’s a slut! a SLUT!” line of “reasoning” in contempt. In our case it was used by the defense not the prosecution (sexual battery case) but very similar otherwise. The jury was utterly disgusted by it.

Holy shit ginmar, I heard nothing about that case.  Guy Turcotte is his name.  Knowing nothing about the evidence, I’m still pretty disgusted.  It reminds me of the case here in the states, years ago, when a man found his wife in bed with another man.  He took off for a few hours but then came back and killed her with a shotgun.  The judge gave him 18 months in prison and said something like he understood the need to give “corporal punishment.”  Corporal punishment!  By murdering your wife!

In the Anthony case, I think the biggest mistake was made by the police in not following up on Kronk’s report of finding something suspicious near the Anthony home.  If they’d found her body in August when he first discovered it there likely would’ve been more physical evidence left behind.  Instead, they didn’t find her until December and her remains were skeletal.  They couldn’t prove HOW she died, which left the door open for reasonable doubt, according to the jurors who’ve now spoken out.

“Quite literally, the first thing I learned about Casey Anthony through osmosis is that the father of her murdered daughter is an unknown person.”

I think either “literally” or “osmosis” doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Guy Turcotte was not acquitted. He was declared not responsible of his act. He is now under psychological evaluation to know if he needs to be interned, if he can be released under conditions, or if he can now be released with no conditions (I find that last one unlikely).

Lots of other murder cases hand down convictions for less—basically, a body being found or even just missing,suspects being in the right place and the right time, with a clear motive, and are clearly lying and have no credibility. All of that was present in the Casey Anthony case with the exception of a clear motive, and that’s why a 1st degree murder charge want sustainable. I suspect they could has gotten a conviction if they pushed for a lower charge and kept focused on prosecuting that.

It’s interesting that so many people (basically everybody), as soon as it was clear Dominique Strauss-Kahn wasn’t going to be convicted, immediately said “Aha! He’s absolutely innocent! We should lock up that evil woman who falsely accused him!” etc… Now, with this case, Casey Anthony is acquitted, and everyone immediately says “What a travesty! She’s clearly guilty!” It may be more likely than not that DSK is innocent (although the defense argument seems be entirely based around slut-shaming), and more likely than not that Anthony is guilty, but the near universality of these reactions is evidence that we continue to live in a fairly patriarchal culture.  It’s not a clear cut case either way - there’s reasonable doubt in both situations.

Casey Anthony is going to be freed, but I really think she’s going to need a security detail for a while while the teaming masses of “omg guilty slut needs to BURN” idiots calm the fuck down. And the cost of the detail should be paid for by Headline News.

In this particular case, I blame the legs the story had on Nancy Grace and her dead child of the week story being streatched out to many months and returned to regularly.  If that woman was ever a good lawyer, I don’t think there is anything left of that.  All I see is a media drama queen feeding her audience on “oh, the slut!” and “the poor, poor little children”.

I have no use for the local news under any circumstances (I’m in Orlando).  But several weeks ago the TV was on a local channel when I turned it on, so I watched for a bit.

There had been a hearing that day wherein the judge ruled in favor of the defense.  The legal expert on the news characterized this as the defense having “got one over” (or words to that effect) on the court.

And that was all the local coverage I could stomach.

The Turcotte case just particularly hits me because locally a woman’s boyfriend murdered her two children in retaliation for her contacting the police following a domestic dispute.  Police just found their bodies in an abandoned car yesterday.  This kind of revenge killing to get back at the partner happens far too often.

I also got a handful of tweets from crazed anti-feminists who have decided, with what evidence I don’t know, that I’m some big time supporter of Casey Anthony, the woman acquitted for killing her toddler.

A few others have already touched on it, but it’s just the wingnuts playing their 6 Degrees of Abortion game.  You support abortion rights, so therefore you must have no problem with murdering a toddler and tossing her in the swamp.  It’s their usual phony moral posturing.

Ruby wrote:

If there is a feminist narrative here, it may very well be the clash of silly fantasies about how young women who are forced to give birth will totes love their ‘unexpected’ “bundles of joy” and will “grow up” and be wonderful mommies, and the reality of how young women actually tend to react to forced motherhood..

This is dead on, and I guarantee it’s an argument that will *not* be examined by our idiot media.

Re Carbon Dated’s comment at #41: 

I happen to love it when rude and pedantic people are outright foolish in their pedantry.  Obviously, Amanda means that she literally knew nothing else about the case before she knew that the father of the murdered child was unknown.  She also means that she absorbed that knowledge in a way similar to that of the a substance permeating a cell membrane, i.e. by osmosis, a permeation of her consciousness. Yes, she is using “osmosis” in a common metaphorical sense, and clearly does not mean the “osmosis” portion of her statement “literally.”

I am pretty sure she knows the meaning of both words quite well.  I am glad she is a big thinker who prolifically churns out blog posts without getting hung-up on nit-picking.  You know perfectly well what she meant as I am sure did most of her readers.  Now stop being a douchebag.

On Nancy Grace—Juror #3 Jennifer Ford was asked her opinion of Nancy and said, she didn’t want to say much about it publicly but it was a negative opinion, and she felt that Nancy Grace just “fed fuel to the fire.”  Later on GMA Nancy went on a tirade about how she doesn’t give a crap if the jury’s “feelings were hurt” by her comments about them, which was a lovely mischaracterization of the juror’s statement.  It was kind of fun to watch the reasonable, level-headed, polite juror pwn Nancy!

Sour Kraut, actually, sociologically speaking, we’re just not getting the whole story.

The feminist narrative of the clash of the silly fantasies about how young women who are forced to give birth will totes love their unexpected bundles of joy and will grow up to be wonderful mommies is not negated by the reality of how women actually tend to react to forced motherhood.

The follow-up narrative is this:
and if you don’t totes love your unexpected bundle of joy and blissfully become the wonderful mommy, we will fucking hunt you down and make sure everyone knows that you’re a horrible slut who should die.

Tattoos?! ZOMG! There’s a couple round here, then, who just must have had three or four other kids and killed them secretly in addition to the couple of happy, well-adjusted ones we see them around town with.

The Turcotte case (man with enough money to hire a good lawyer) is the kind that particularly bothers me because, duh, you’d have to be a fscking nutter to kill your own children to get back at your spouse. But still the kind of nutter who is a moral agent.

Count me as one who thought she was guilty. I only loosely “followed” the case though the local paper and co-workers who seemed to be VERY invested in the outcome. Of course, I am not an attorney and, as stated above, not super familiar with the evidence, so when it came back not guilty I just assumed there was a valid reason and went about my day.

Other people here (Southern California) were ready to form a lynch mob and drive to FL to do what the jury wouldn’t.

Mighty, it’s obviously not the whole story—plenty more to unpack here. 

I haven’t read all the comments, forgive me, but I’ve only got a moment at work and I wanted to be a dissenting voice. While I’m sure slut-shaming was part of the issue for many, for a lot of us the issue was the slutty behavior while her daughter was missing, or, after that story didn’t hold water, slutty behavior 2 days after her 2-year-old daughter drowned. Calling her out on the partying wasn’t just hyper-morality, it was to point out that she was acting like a freaking sociopath. Which I am convinced she is.

While I’m sure slut-shaming was part of the issue for many, for a lot of us the issue was the slutty behavior while her daughter was missing, or, after that story didn’t hold water, slutty behavior 2 days after her 2-year-old daughter drowned.

Yeah! When my two year old daughter went missing/drowned I didn’t party! Nor did all the other people I know whose toddlers went missing/drowned! I responded like a proper grieving sobbing bundle of adorable maternal femininity! Because that’s normal!

Oh, wait, I’ve never had a kid—especially one that died—so I have no idea what’s normal. Also I’m not Casey Anthony, so I have no idea what her “normal” responses are to things.

But I think my point stands! Her actions don’t fit my fantasy dead-kid narrative so she’s clearly a sociopath! And things not fitting my fantasies is evidence enough for me; burn her!

Oh my God, thank you for this post. I have been hearing nothing but “what kind of horrible person reacts that way” and “who doesn’t report their child missing” and “how could the jury not convict her?” from every single person I know—even the lawyers I work with. Finally, some sanity. Something shady clearly happened, but man, just because you think you know, doesn’t mean that’s the truth. Wow.

Re. “oh no, she was slutty two days after her daughter died”, the prosecution case under which Angela Cannings was convicted was largely that on finding her second child dead she phoned her husband in distress, not 999. Because obviously no mother, finding her child dead would not know at once that emergency treatment was completely useless and phone the child’s father in anguish to tell him. No doubt many people would, finding a clearly dead baby, phone 999 in useless desperation anyway. But all that not doing that shows is that you knew the baby was dead, not that you’d murdered it.

Some people, finding their child not in the garden, will phone 999 at once. That doesn’t mean that the one who checked the neighbour’s garden and found said child playing in the flowerbeds was secretly hoping the kid had been hit by a car.

I’m pretty horrified by this, too.  As a mom I’m absolutely horrified at the idea of partying and drinking in the immediate aftermath of the death of my child.  I find it repugnant and foreign and inconceivable.  I am also horrified at what the tattoo said (“The Beautiful Life,” in Italian).  I can’t even conceptualize what it would be like to be in that head space.

But do I know that she did it?  No.  Did the prosecution prove that she did it?  No.  And am I going to send someone to jail or, in this case, to die, just because I can’t understand why they would act the way that they did?  Hell no.  Do we get to have a justice system or not, people?  “I’m repulsed by your non-murder actions” is absolutely insufficient grounds to send someone to their death, and, what’s more, is that none of this is bringing back Caylee.  None of it.  It’s grotesque.

I consider it awesome that I know almost nothing about the media (TV?) coverage of the case.  What I know I’ve seen in the news.google headlines.  What I primarily gleaned was that it was inescapably obvious that she had done it, and that the cover up was the smoking gun somehow (all items in this sentence in scare quotes).  Sex and tattoos, though.  Hum.  What an oddly Puritan society we have.

The partying is easy enough to explain; her friends saying “We know you’re sad, but this is as good a night as any to start getting on with life” would about cover it. You can’t mourn a loss forever; I know someone who did when her son was killed in a car accident and that led to two suicide attempts, the second successful.

Honestly, I’m seeing a lot of the “give Ted the benefit of the doubt on Chappaquiddick” narrative in this story—Casey’s coverup wasn’t driven by malice so much as panic and confusion about what to do next. The fucked-uppedness of the family probably made it a likely result. Her actions, whatever they actually were, were wrong, but likely understandable under the circumstances. Absent evidence of malice, her lifestyle is likely irrelevant here.

The big problem: What to do about Nancy Grace? She really seems like the worst kind of evil—an authoritarian leader on a templar’s crusade, like Eichmann with actual pull. People like that can make a reasonable case that they’re on the side of the angels; it would fall apart on examination of course, but they’ve already hit all the important points, so they aren’t going to believe you when you wave it in their faces. This is what we’re up against—Lawful Stupid.

I would like to make a general point that actual grieving is extremely different than what we expect it to be.  We’re conditioned by movies and tv shows and books and other fiction, but very few of us have actually experienced this kind of grief.  There’s also a lot of variety in how different people grieve.  Hell, my cat nearly died and the grief was so painful I couldn’t bear it, and losing a child would be a million times worse.  And the weird thing is that when I found out my cat would live, I didn’t suddenly become happy again.  And being in the place where you used to live with the one you lost is the worst place to be because every little thing reminds you of them.  For the one night that my cat was in the animal hospital, I got said from looking at the chair he’d never sleep on again, and then when I hid the chair, I got sad looking at the empty space it used to be.  So yeah, if I lost a kid for a real, I can imagine doing anything to get out of the house and just get away from the constant reminders, and I can also imagine drinking a whole lot to dull the pain.

I think Anthony is guilty because there is physical evidence and she lied to the police.  I don’t think her partying has anything to do with it.  I am honestly not surprised by any type of grieving.  Every person is different but even the “typical” grief isn’t just like the way it’s portrayed in movies.  It’s so much more painful than any of us can imagine and we should stop using reactions as a way to determine if someone is guilty.

This doesn’t stop people (read comments nowhere, guys) from declaring this a travesty of justice, like if the crime involves a cute enough victim then no evidence should be required! Innocent until proven guilty doesn’t apply to this case, because young mothers! Or something!
Comment #19: Tenya on 07/06 at 10:07 PM

The guys who always cry innocent until proven guilty and <i>let’s not try this person in the media/court of public opinion his life could be ruined<i> for DSK and Julian Assange and in every other sa case ever have been conspicuously absent. Not only on the interwebs, but on CNN as well. Piers Morgan and his talking heads are talking about what a travesty of justice this is and how Anthony should be shunned and are we comfortable with someone like her out on the streets.

This doesn’t stop people (read comments nowhere, guys) from declaring this a travesty of justice, like if the crime involves a cute enough victim then no evidence should be required! Innocent until proven guilty doesn’t apply to this case, because young mothers! Or something!
Comment #19: Tenya on 07/06 at 10:07 PM

Notice how all the criers of innocent until proven guilty and let’s not try this person in the media/court of public opinion his life could be ruined for DSK and Julian Assange and for every other rape case ever have been conspicuously absent in this death penalty case. Not only on the interwebs, but on CNN as well. Piers Morgan and his talking heads are all talking about what a travesty of justice this is and how Anthony should be shunned and are we comfortable with someone like her out on the streets.

Sorry about the double post. Computer’s glitchy today.

Nick @ Comment #44:

My general inclination is that Casey and DSK are both guilty of a lot more than either will ever be convicted for. I don’t know if Anthony murdered her child, but I have trouble believing that she had no role whatsoever in the child’s death. The jury got the verdict right because the evidence didn’t prove murder one. Had the primary charge been manslaughter, I think it’s highly likely she would have gotten convicted. As for DSK, I think it’s likely that there was an assault of some sort, but for whatever reason the evidence is leaving some room for doubt, and the prosecutors don’t want to push a case they think is likely to lose.

I think the most damning piece of evidence against her wasn’t that she was partying in the aftermath of her daughter’s death, it was that she didn’t bother reporting her kid missing for 30 days. Seriously, what good parent would do that?

The fact that she waited until her daughter had been missing for 30 days to report it to authorities would probably be excellent evidence if she had been tried for being a lousy mother. I am certain they could have easily convicted her for being a bad mother. But she wasn’t on trial for being a bad mother, she was on trial for murder. And while not reporting the child missing for 30 days may prove that she’s a really crappy mom, it doesn’t prove that she’s a murderer.

I share the sentiment of one of the jurors - just because they declared her not guilty doesn’t mean they were declaring her innocent. I think she’s going to have an extremely hard life once she walks out of jail next Tuesday. I can’t imagine anyone giving her a job, and I’m sure she’s probably got a $250,000 legal bill coming from her defense attorneys. She’s being sued by the woman who she claimed was the nanny who killed her child, and I won’t be surprised if other lawsuits arise as well. I know a lot of people think she’s gonna skate through life since she was acquitted, but I am quite sure she’s going to have a lot of problems going through life. And if the truth is that she did actually kill her child, which is quite possible, she’s going to have to live with that on her conscience, and it will probably torment her for the rest of her life. I don’t envy her at all.

Why isn’t there a crime for not reporting your child missing?  Isn’t that part of the problem with trying to pile everything into first-degree murder when all you have are disparate parts not linked to any one person.

#57: Umm…actually, I DO know quite a bit about grieving, having counseled hundreds of grieving family members over the years (my screen name is not just a reference to a classic 70s Saturday morning cartoon!) Her behavior was the most atypical and bizarre response to “grieving” I’ve ever heard of. It was consistent, however, with a sociopath who feels nothing for other humans. And that’s not a fantasy, despite your charming attacks on my opinion.

#62: Her friends weren’t “helping her grieve,” she lied and told them the kid was with the nanny. Did you read about their testimony? The boyfriend was shocked and horrified when he learned what had been going on.

#63: Drinking to drown the pain? She entered a hot body contest. I guess that helps with the trauma, as well?

However, the point made by many above is the most important:  this behavior, while shocking and repellent (especially to anyone who has raised a child) in no way proves that she murdered the child.

Amanda:
I’m glad you posted this.  Over the last few weeks I’d come close to posting to ask you about the coverage of the trial, with particular attention to Nancy Grace’s slut-shaming.  The whole thing: the attractiveness (and race!) of Caylee, Casey’s seemingly callous behavior and Nancy Grace’s endless riding of this hobby-horse seemed to be a classic example of the kind of thing that tabloids spin up as a morality tale.  And it’s worth mentioning that Nancy Grace hounded another young mother whose child had disappeared to suicide.  That child is still missing.  The day the verdict came down Nancy was on some cable channel, probably HLN, ranting about the stupidity and inappropriateness of the jury.  She’s reprehensible.

Dr. Drew has been quite awful in covering this story too, but somehow always manages to frame himself as Mr. Voice of Reason while keeping a straight face.
There was one particular episode of his show where he repeatedly referred to her as a “cold-hearted mm” - he self-blanked the word “bitch,” but the implication was quite clear. Then after the verdict and sentence was passed down, he was all concern-faced about the vitriol toward Anthony in the general public and how she’ll manage to protect her safety. One would be hard-pressed to find a bigger hypocrite than that guy.

Oh, wait, I’ve never had a kid—especially one that died—so I have no idea what’s normal. Also I’m not Casey Anthony, so I have no idea what her “normal” responses are to things.

The police, who have seen hundreds of people deal with dead/missing relatives, do know what’s normal. So do plenty of people who have jobs where they see people encounter these tragedies day in and day out.

For us, facing a tragedy will only happen once or twice in our lives, if ever. But professionals see lots of people go through this. So I think one can make a judgment about whether a reaction is “normal” or not.