Step Right Up!: (Reluctantly) Weighing in on the Casey Anthony Circus

I cannot believe I'm writing this blog. I have ignored the entire Casey Anthony debacle as much as possible, and I wouldn't even have known they reached a verdict had every news source not been blasting it. Of course, as soon as the verdict was read, Facebook blew up. In fact, there are already two of those re-postables in honor of the little girl going around, after only about 45 minutes. By the way, this post is probably going to piss some people off, just to warn you.

First of all, I am making no judgments on whether she did or did not kill her daughter. I was not there. I did not see anything, was not present in the courtroom to see evidence or hear testimony, nor do I even know any of the people involved even remotely. Therefore, I have no reason to think my judgments would be correct. If she did do it, she should have been punished, though the death penalty would never have been reasonable in my opinion. If she didn't, I'm glad she was acquitted.

I am not writing this to yell and scream about her not guilty verdict. Nor am I writing it to proclaim her innocence. As I said, who am I to say? I was not on her jury. What this is about is the public response to the whole mess. Since it began, the public has been collectively losing its mind over this case. Yes, it is sad that a small child died. Is she the only one that died at that time? No. Is she the only one who died under odd circumstances? No. Do I think that if she had been a child of color or someone much poorer the media would have jumped on this? No. The Casey Anthony circus reminds me a great deal of the Jon Benet Carnival several years back, and I have the same opinions about that mess as well.

I continue to be depressed and aggravated by my fellow human beings. You would think the woman had come into their homes and murdered their child from the tone and comments. The comment (from Facebook, of course) that bothered me the most was: "I have never been so disappointed or disgusted with our legal system." Really? Never? Not once? While I do believe that murder is a serious and terrible offence, this particular case is certainly not one that made me lose faith in the legal system. That happened years and years ago and continues to happen repeatedly. Rapists walk the streets, women are still forced to pay for their own rape kits in some areas, children are taken away from loving parents because of sexual preference, a homeless man is given years in prison for stealing $100 because he was hungry (which he later returned on the grounds that "he was raised better") yet a person who steals billions (literally) in corporate America is given mere months, Leonard Peltier is still in prison, poor people and people of color are disproportionately jailed for minor offences that the wealthy and white continually get away with....

So, do I mourn the fact that a young life was ended, possibly violently? Of course, but I also mourn the thousands who die homeless and hungry, who are killed by bullets and bombs in idiotic wars, who suffer needlessly everyday. The point is that if the Casey Anthony case is the first thing that made you question the justice of our legal system or anything else in this world, you have not been paying attention.