That Spectacle

I don't know what people expected. Justice maybe? I don't know- I didn't follow the Casey Anthony Trial- at all. I thought it was disgusting and more than a little nauseating. A little girl was dead. The mother and the parents were telling half a dozen different stories, none of which made sense to me and Nancy Grace and a veritable platoon of media turned into a circus. Which this country promptly ate up.

Do I think she did it? Probably. I'm guessing OJ did too, but with no physical evidence due to the time lapse and a shaky motive (she wanted to off her kid so she could go party? I'm having trouble buying that notion- even more than all the defense team's stories) there was too much doubt for the jury to reasonable convict. Disgusting though it may be, the system worked.

What I do think this is a good argument for is banning all cameras in courtrooms. Once you put someone in front of a camera, things just go to shit, it seems. It turned the OJ Trial into a circus- and it turned this one into a media orgy-- and it's totally unecessary. Preserve some objectivity. Don't invite half a million idiot pundits into the process- I mean, they were interviewing Doctor Drew about the verdict. Doctor Drew. I have no idea what that man knows about the criminal justice system, but he needs to stay on VH1 ministering to Z-List Celebrity Washouts where he belongs.

It's a beautiful notion and one we should explore- and it has the advantage of not pissing all over anybody's 1st Amendment rights: the Supreme Court has been firmly against cameras in their hallowed chambers for years and the media has been allowed to do its job. In the age of reality television, it seems as soon as you introduce cameras into any given environment, everyone starts scrabbling for their fifteen minutes of fame.

At the end of the day, like everyone else, I struggle to understand why.

I found this, though- a push is getting underway in multiple states to make it a felony not to report a missing child to law enforcement in a timely manner. You would have thought that for any given parent this would be a no-brainer, which makes the 31 day lapse before reporting her daughter missing extremely suspicious (at least to me). It's worth signing.

And just remember- not guilty does not mean innocent.