Casey Anthony found Not Guilty

Can someone have background on this? I don't know much and Wikipedia is hard to understand :(
 
From what I remember -

Casey Anthony was a young woman whose daughter Kaley went missing and she didn't report it for like 2 months and she was out partying with her friends. Eventually her own mother, the girl's grandmother found out and made her daughter call the police about it. Casey told the police some non-existent Mexican woman she knew kidnapped her. No one who knew Casey had ever heard of this woman.

The police noticed it smelled like a dead body had been in the trunk of her car but she said the smell came from some old pizza.

Eventually the police found the girl's body near the grandparents house after a heavy rainfall and there was duct tape attached to the body. It all seemed pretty suspicious but no hard evidence.

I could be wrong about some of these details and left out additional ones so correct me if I'm wrong people.

-- Had to edit since I mixed up the names Case and Kaley a couple of times. Sorry to people who already read it.
 
Nancy Grace is a disgrace to the legal profession and everything Jolly is saying about her is absolutely correct. I am blissfully and intentionally ignorant of the Casey Anthony trial but it sounds like nothing has changed with Ms. Grace. She is always, always wrong. In fact if you ever do have to listen to her, the safest course of action would be adopting the opposite of what she is saying as a matter of course.

Some light reading on her can be found here. Relevant tidbits:

I have no issue with true crime, as long as it is true. Ms. Grace, a former prosecutor in Atlanta who was reprimanded for stepping over a line more than once, obliterates lines every night on “Nancy Grace.” Working with a contingent of experts who have all the independence of a crew of trained seals, Ms. Grace races toward judgment, heedlessly ignoring nuance and evidence on her way to finding guilt.

Ms. Grace knows what she knows with a great deal of certainty, but she was wrong about the now debunked rape charges against the Duke lacrosse team, she was wrong about who kidnapped Elizabeth Smart. She taped a corrosive interview in 2006 with Melinda Duckett, whose 2-year-old son had gone missing, and Ms. Duckett killed herself the next day. Ms. Grace broadcast the interview anyway.
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The article points out that she also lied in her memoir, called "Objections." The irony of the title of her book is...amusing.

She also had a questionable ethics record as a prosecutor. This blog posts recounts some of her biggest blemishes:

I’ve been following the Nancy Grace case with much distress. For those who haven’t been following the incident, Nancy Grace, the host of a epononymously-titled legal show on CNN and CourtTV, was recently chastised by the 11th Circuit as having "played fast and loose" with her ethical duties as a Fulton County, Georgia prosecutor in 1990. See Stephens v. Hall, No. 03-15251 (11th Cir., May 2, 2005).

On her Court TV biography page, Grace lists her perfect record of nearly 100 felony convictions at trial and no losses. This record is slightly less impressive, however, when you review the 11th Circuit’s decision, which, while upholding the conviction, criticizes Grace for failing to follow her obligation to disclose information about other potential suspects to defense counsel, as well as knowingly using a detective’s false testimony that there were no other suspects. And this wasn’t the first time Grace was criticized for her unethical behavior as a prosecutor. In 1997, the Georgia Supreme Court called her improper summations and her withholding evidence from the defense "inexcusable." Carr v. State, 267 Ga. 701 (1997). And in 1995, the same court reversed one of Grace’s convictions because she "exceeded the wide latitude of closing argument" by referring to the defendant’s prior convictions, which were not relevant to the case. Bell v. State, 263 Ga. 776 (1994).
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I blame the CSI effect - people believe in science being the smoking gun that should give a definite answer. They can't put 2 and 2 together - it has to be right there.

I mean, come on, found her dead body in a pool and duct tape the mouth and throw the body in the woods out of panic to make it look like a murder? Jesus christ. THAT is plausible explanation for the death in the minds of the jury? Why not just go with that ape that tore that womans face off has come back from the dead and killed her?

Edit - but the bottom line is the jury does not hear the media and all the opinions that we do. They have to come up with their own - and in courtrooms it is not about the evidence. It's about which lawyer can twist and bend the information the best to their advantage.
 
The person she blamed existed, but they had never met. Her story has tons of holes. With the evidence against Casey, there is no way she could have been completely not involved in the death of her child. At the very least, get her for child negligence.

I agree about the whole CSI effect thing, things rarely work out so cleanly in real life cases. Lots of convictions are based on a mountain of circumstantial evidence.
 
So I didn't pay attention to the trial at all, but could jollyroger (or fredlc if he is here) or some other person that does know law explain why it may have helped to not have the defendant testify? At least I think I heard that on the tv right when the case was going to a close.

I mean, if I was a juror I would want a person with apparent holes in their story to testify in their own case against them.
 
OJ was RICH and FAMOUS, those are the words you should have been looking for Dreadnought. The fact that he's black actually hurts his chances in the legal system.
 
I only tuned in for the last week of the case and I'm not familiar with all the pundit analysis that went on during the long period of time before I even tuned in.

Without any exposure to the rest of the case, I felt the defense's closing argument on Saturday (I think) was way better than the prosecution's following rebuttal. So I am not surprised by what happened. Whether one side actually had the facts right or not, I don't know. The defense's argument was a lot of talk about reasonable doubt. They just did a better job at speaking to the jury.

No surprise to see the reporters condemning her for smiling and showing signs of relief. Also no surprise to see them basically calling for blood. "A little girl is dead, was justice done?" I get the sense that most Americans could care less about the truth, as long as someone is punished and dealt with harshly, doesn't matter who, but someone must pay. That's the way that a lot of the reporters came off to me. Don't get me wrong, I still think that C. Anthony is a horrible person and probably involved somehow. She's obviously a psychologically messed up liar.
 
Kennigit said:
So I didn't pay attention to the trial at all, but could jollyroger (or fredlc if he is here) or some other person that does know law explain why it may have helped to not have the defendant testify? At least I think I heard that on the tv right when the case was going to a close.

I mean, if I was a juror I would want a person with apparent holes in their story to testify in their own case against them.
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Because a skilled prosecutor would shread someone like Casey Anthony. If you had a ham sandwich for lunch, a skilled prosecutor would not only indict you for something criminally related to your lunch, but also get a grand jury to indict the ham sandwich. Even though I feel the prosecution was outlawyered here, they were still highly skilled.

By law, the defendant does not have to prove anything or cover up holes. The prosecution does. Putting the defendant on the stand generally only helps the prosecution. If I was charged with a crime (even if I were innocent), I would likely not take the stand in my defense, even if I felt I could handle the cross examination from the prosecutor. It is a huge risk and you just have to live with the fact that some jurors may wonder why they didn't hear from the defendant. You do your best to cover this reason at voir dire (jury selection) and in closing.
 
Csi effect indeed.

Betteer prosecutors could've pulled it off imo. Defense didn't seem much better either and they still won.
 
JR, do you find the length (fairly short in this case) the jury took to get a complete acquittal of the major charges surprising?
 
Having read a bit more about this it seems to me like the prosecution either didn't do a good enough job or just didn't have much of a case to begin with.

I'm surprised this woman isn't being charged with putting her child in harm's way, or some charge like that.
 
Moss said:
JR, do you find the length (fairly short in this case) the jury took to get a complete acquittal of the major charges surprising?
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I think the OJ jury was out for only 4 hours. If they worked from the lesser charges on up and found out they had acquittal by the time they got to the lesser of the more serious charges, then it could be done quickly. If I had been a juror that thought the prosecution didn't make its case, I would have manipulated my fellow jurors with such an approach, though prepared for a knock-down drag out on the less serious of the more serious charges. Apparently that knock-down drag out did not occur.
 
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