The Casey Antony verdict has really taken me back to that moment in my middle school classroom where my English teacher turned on a television so we could all watch the OJ Simpson verdict. There was no context, no discussion, just an all white school of pubescent kids modeling their parent's and teacher's opinions. Of course, his guilt was assumed to be without a doubt.
So, I've heard a lot about Casey Anthony lately. I hear about it from friends, family, and coworkers. Sometimes Caylee's death is twisted into arguments against abortion.
I am tired of it. I'm (always) tired of Nancy Grace. I'm tired of the mob mentality. I am tired of watching the media cover one child's murder while a child was just savagely murdered in Michigan, and while children are abused and murdered every day. Caylee can't be brought back to life, so let's not pretend we're talking about justice here. If we want to talk about justice, we ought to be talking about preventing child abuse, murder, and offering support services to parents who, perhaps, had no positive role model in their own childhood, or who suffer from mental illness, addiction, or feel they're at a breaking point for any reason. We ought to not be twisting a child's death into a political arguments against abortion, but instead preventing unwanted pregnancies, and that ISN'T going to happen when funding for places like Planned Parenthood gets stripped away by people who ignore that the vast majority of their services have nothing to do with abortion.
Planned Parenthood provided me with my first prescription for low cost birth control, and in doing so it prevented unwanted pregnancies, and that means Planned Parenthood prevented abortions.
The justice system is horribly flawed, but I find it particularly strange that so many members of the angry mob point this out only in relation to Casey Anthony and OJ Simpson. When were there so many people outraged over the convictions of innocent people who were later exonerated by DNA evidence? Where was the massive press coverage when Michal Anthony Green was exonerated by DNA evidence, but only after spending 27 years in prison.
While I consider Nancy Grace's sociopathic tendencies evidence that she is out to exploit and capitalize on the victims she covers, I believe many people who are outraged are good people in need of catharsis. I understand that, but let's not confuse it for justice.
If we want to talk about justice we should be talking about supporting (politically and financially) high tech forensic labs that reduce the risk of contamination of evidence, and provide examiners the tools they need to create a case based on more than circumstantial evidence. We should be talking about setting up scholarships that encourage our brightest scientific minds to go into criminology and forensic pathology. We should spend less time devoting news coverage to Casey Anthony's trial and verdict, and more time focusing on the children that have been victimized every single day, sometimes right next door to someone sitting on the couch, cursing Casey Anthony.
It's not that I think Casey is innocent, by the way, but it's really hard to tell what I think and what I feel when every image of her I've seen on television and online -- at places like huffingtonpost.com -- shows her smirking. Guilty or innocent, the media has a definite bias against her, because they have a bias towards sensationalism. And this was one sensational case.
Having just recently devoted so much of my time to reading about the life, time, and work of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, I do feel a particularly strong fear and disgust towards mob justice and media bias that favors sensationalism over evidence. So, I find the attacks on the jurors to be especially disturbing.
According to the Innocence Project, 272 people have been exonerated post conviction, based on DNA evidence. Obviously, our justice system is far from perfect, but to abandon it and return to mob rule and gut instincts would be to return to the days of Wells-Barnett where many innocent people were tortured and executed, and where the guilty escaped or would never stand trial, simply because the mob didn't hold them accountable, because the mob follows instinct, rather than evidence.
Even with the flaws of our system, holding our justice system to a high standard isn't only about protecting defendants, it's also about the victims. For every person wrongfully convicted the real threat to society walks, and can live without fear of being caught. The Innocence Project has helped gather data and propose reforms that can help both innocent defendants, and victims.
There are many times when I wish America did things a little more like many other countries. I wish we didn't have factory farms. I wish we didn't go to war in Iraq. I wish we had universal health care. I wish college tuition didn't cost so much money. I wish American sitcoms could be a little more British. But, I've always considered our justice system, our promise of a fair trial, to be the crown jewel of our system. So if we're talking about justice, we ought to be talking about protecting it.
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