Acquitted Casey Anthony Is A Free Woman…Or Is She Really?

No, I didn’t watch every minute of every day of the Casey Anthony murder trial, but like many of you, I watched enough of it to realize that the State of Florida didn’t do enough to prove its case against Anthony beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Do I think Casey murdered her daughter Caylee? Like most of you, I would have to say yes, so I have trouble believing lead defense attorney José Baez that justice was done for both Caylee AND Casey because “Casey didn’t kill Caylee.”

In other words, I believe, as I did in the most celebrated trial of the last millennium — the O.J. Simpson murder trial — that another murderer has been set free.

But, the fact is that Baez’s opening statements were the ones that proved prophetic in this case. The burden of the proof was on the State and while it was true that the prosecution did present “a mountain of evidence,” Baez correctly predicted that not one piece of that mountain was going to physically connect Casey to what seemed to most everyone to be the senseless murder of her daughter.

Knowing that they had a flawed case from the get-go, why did neither the Orange County Sheriff’s Office nor the lead prosecutor and Assistant State Attorney Jeff Ashton and his boss, State Attorney Lawson Lamar, look harder for other possible suspects? There is no “statute of limitations” on capital murder cases, so if they were sure Casey did it…and acted alone…why did they feel the need to spend all this taxpayer money and grab all these national headlines now, knowing they were likely to fail? “Beyond all reasonable doubt” is still hard to prove with physical evidence tying the defendant to the victim. With today’s forensic science capabilities, proving your case with only circumstantial evidence must be even harder now than it ever was before.

So, Casey is now free and she is pretty enough and her case sensational enough for her to cash in on her 15 minutes of unwanted fame/notoriety.

What is most important, at least to me, is the hope that the advances in forensic science will continue to be geometric, so that fewer and fewer criminals will get away with murders, rapes and other heinous crimes. I also hope prosecutors will learn that unless you have a case you know you can win, keep working the case until you have a winner and make sure you explore and exhaust all other suspects and possibilities before taking a case to trial.

As for Ms. Anthony, I believe that anyone who doesn’t report their child missing for a month should be serving more than just three years for lying to the police.

I also believe that despite Baez’s claim that Caylee’s death was a “horrible accident that spiraled out of control,” someone (or more than one person) got away with not only a horrifying murder, but also with an equally sickening cover-up of the crime.

I also believe that Casey Anthony, like O.J. Simpson, will be spending more days in criminal court in the not-too-distant future, despite the certainty that she will make millions of dollars off the death of her beautiful toddler.

But, most of all, I also believe in our criminal justice system, despite the fact I believe the silver-tongued Mr. Baez helped a murderer go free in this case that so captivated this great country of ours.

A well-known judge and criminal lawyer friend of my father’s in New York once told me that although it’s terrible when someone guilty walks away from a crime scott-free, he would rather let 1,000 guilty criminals get away with it than send one innocent man or woman to jail or to be put to death for a crime they didn’t commit.

So, I guess I have to be O.K. with Baez and Mason and even the Anthony family cashing in on their “fame.” Baez and Mason, at least, deserve to be going on book and speaker tours.

And, I just have this feeling that Ms. Anthony will still end up behind bars someday. It won’t bring back Caylee or avenge her murder, but it will still be somewhat satisfying.