When I was little, I always had a hard time distinguishing between someone being found “not guilty” and being “innocent.” “Guilty” was clear to me: it meant a bunch of random people on a jury all came to the same conclusion that an accused person ought to be punished for his or her crime. The ideas of crime, court, lawyers, and the law itself have always swirled in my head. It might have something to do with the fact that both my parents are lawyers or that I grew up in a household with the nightly news always blaring. While my parents sat on our old gray-checkered couch, I’d do my little girl thing and bounce about on the carpet. But clearly the message that criminals existed infiltrated my mind and it was at this early age that I began to think, in the way a six year could, about the American legal system.
In fact, as I look back on it, one of the most frightening but necessary realizations I came to in second grade was that, unlike I had previously gathered, there wasn’t a 50/50 split between those who died of old age and those who died by gunfire. It took me a long time to realize that gun violence, while a reality, wasn’t a part of daily life for most people in the U.S. With all these things in mind, I can’t help but think now about what major cases mean for American society and for all those who watch them progress. How do we live in a world where a woman can murder her child, a jury can all suspect as much, and she ultimately escape conviction and be found “not guilty”?
I remember hearing about the disappearance of a little girl named Caylee Anthony a couple years back in 2008. At the time, I was wrapped up in college decisions, leaving a school I’d attended for 13 years, and generally just accepted this missing child as another young girl who’d met an unfair ending. Attention is always paid to the deaths of little girls of particular backgrounds (read: non-minority) and the hyper focus on her disappearance seemed no different. It wasn’t until this spring, though, that I began to pay any serious attention to the case. Her mother, Casey Anthony, seemed by all accounts to be at least partially responsible for her child’s death. It’s all too disturbingly perfect: her 2 year old goes missing and she doesn’t bother to call the police for 31 days (which, by the way, is a month for those who might be counting), chooses to go out and party instead (because what better way to help find your kid than downing a couple cranberry and vodkas), pretends the kid is with a nanny named Zanny (c’mon, please get more creative next time, Casey), there’s evidence of searches for ways to suffocate a human being and the child’s body is found with duct tape across her mouth, and the smell of a decomposing body in the trunk of a car is explained away as a bag of rotting garbage. If all of these pieces together don’t make a strong case for this woman’s guilt, what would?
After hearing that she was found not guilty, two things crossed my mind. The first was horror. The second thing I thought of, though, was my experience as a juror last summer. I couldn’t get out of it. I’d been summoned twice since I graduated high school and unlike everyone in the jury lottery who couldn’t serve because they had to stay home to feed their turtles, were 99 years old or couldn’t make it mostly due to disinterest, I had no real excuse. I was gainfully unemployed for the summer and it seemed like a good opportunity to see what court was like. Without breaking my oath to protect the details of the case, I can share that I had to judge whether the accused was guilty or not guilty of second-degree murder. In my head and according to the evidence presented both by the defense and the prosecution, I believed the man was not guilty. But more than that I trusted that he was indeed innocent, that, outside of the limitations of legal framework and binary guilty vs not guilty, he had not actually committed a murder. My peers didn’t feel the same way, though. We ultimately found him not guilty but hardly any of them believed he was innocent and had not killed a man. Here’s the distinction: there are two legal categories that purely access guilt or not guilt. The law requires jurors like the ones on the Anthony case to assume that the only thing that matters is whether or not guilt can be established by the lawyers in court. There’s no room to convict someone or exonerate them based on what they’ve actually done. Instead, jurors must muse about whether the prosecution proved its case.
This irks me because it means that the legal system isn’t designed to handle the truth but rather what representatives (i.e. the defense and prosecution) manage to present to the jury. A man could murder 15 people but if his defense lawyer can wring his or her hands to come up with ways to diminish the strength of the prosecutor’s presentation, the accused can walk free. Doesn’t matter that he’s torn however many communities and lives apart by his violence. The law isn’t concerned with that. It’s about how clever a lawyer is at evading or shaping or even misrepresenting what’s occurred. None of what I’m saying is new or groundbreaking but it’s important to ask if we can call what we have a justice system. If Casey Anthony can, at the very best, be apathetic to the loss of her daughter (as evidenced by her failure to report the kid missing for an entire month) and at the very worst, be responsible for her death and ultimately walk free after serving a few short years jail time, why do we bother with pretending that this is a fair allotment of justice? Why can’t we inquire about innocence and guilt rather than dolling out prison time according to how skillful a lawyer might be at casting or re-casting the accused's role in a crime? Why don’t we have enough room for truth in the American legal system? What’s up with that?
