“Casey Anthony did not murder Caylee,” her attorney, Jose Baez, said after the jury returned a verdict of not guilty of the main charges against the 25-year-old single mother. If I have to explain who Casey is, and who Caylee was, you stopped reading before you got this far. We all have to accept the verdict, but the most plausible explanation of what happened is that Casey did kill her daughter.
None of the jurors would talk to the media, and only one alternate juror did. He said the prosecutors didn’t prove their case beyond a reasonable doubt. I guess that’s what all the jurors thought because there was no long holdout. The verdict came back in relatively short order.
I didn’t follow the trial closely, and I only watched Nancy Grace’s show on Headline News last night to see if her head would explode. It didn’t, but if Casey Anthony didn’t murder Caylee, why is Caylee dead? Since there is a difference between murdering, and killing, did Casey kill her, or will she be following in the tradition of O.J. Simpson, and spend the rest of her days looking for the real killer? The theory that the defense put forth, that Caylee drowned and her grandfather staged the event to look like a murder rather than an accident, falls somewhere between improbable, and impossible. Let’s settle for pretty far-fetched, shall we? Then, there is the fact that the defense didn’t provide any evidence that its theory might be true.
The jury didn’t say Casey was innocent; it said she wasn’t guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Casey cried and hugged her lawyers. George and Cindy, her parents, and Caylee’s grandparents, did not rush to embrace their daughter though. They gathered themselves together, and left the courtroom. George, at least, knows whether he staged an accident to look like a murder, and if I was a juror who saw George, and Cindy’s reaction after the verdict was announced, I might wish that there was such a thing as a do over.
