UPDATE VI: Justice In The Age of YouTube (Innocent whiffs of Chloroform)

Crime, Criminal Injustice, Intelligence, Justice, Law

“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit” was the jingle that captured the legal argument that undergirded the OJ Simpson case, one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in the annals of American justice. Here’s the adaptation for the Casey Anthony case: “If it wasn’t uploaded on YouTube you must acquit.”

It took 12 idiots 11 hours to decide to exonerate the (ALLEGEDLY) filicidal Casey Anthony, who was found “not guilty of first-degree murder and the other most serious charges against her in the 2008 death of her 2-year-old daughter,” Caylee Marie Anthony. (CNN)

The evidence was overwhelming, if circumstantial (as in most murder cases). The prosecution presented the more intelligent, rational sequence of events, where motive, opportunity, and evidence all stacked-up against the sociopathic Casey Anthony.

Caylee was last seen on “June 16, 2008, but was not reported missing until July 15, 2008,” and then only by the child’s grandmother, Cindy Anthony, who “tracked her daughter [the accused] down and demanded answers regarding Caylee’s whereabouts.” Casey then led law enforcement officers on a wild-goose chase, during which this wicked young woman implicated another, non-existent, alleged child minder in an abduction.

All the while Casey Anthony was partying like there was no tomorrow.

The defense team was headed by a not-very bright Jose Baez, who threw everything but the kitchen sink at the 12 idiots who decided Casey Anthony’s fate. Wits were well-matched. From sexual abuse by George Anthony (Casey’s father), to the aforementioned grandpa having helped dispose of his drowned granddaughter body—the 12 bought it.

After all, we all know, from watching, CSI, that if a crime doesn’t happen as depicted in such series—where ample samples of DNA and incriminating footage always materialize —you must acquit.

This is the Age of the Idiot. The average individual seldom reads; he knows only what he sees. If he can’t picture something, he certainly cannot think about it in the abstract.

I expect that grappling with circumstantial evidence, which demands some level of abstraction in thinking, will become harder and harder for juries.

As far as living in ignominy goes: Casey Anthony’s jurors have made OJ’s jurors a little less lonely.

UPDATED I: “A reasonable doubt was turned into a reason to doubt”: this is how a CNN analyst put it very succinctly. It is a result, to an extent, of the commercialization of the adversary legal system.

UPDATE II: Judging from the thread on my Facebook Wall, we are doomed.

UPDATE III: Bill, it seems to me that you are mixing your political theories with the facts of the case. You seem to be following a formula that’s designed to please the requirements of a political philosophy, and not to serve justice. The defense always offers a competing theory of the events. And so it should. If the facts contradict this theory, then it is up to the jury to go where the evidence leads, and not where the world of possibilities lies. Divorced from reality is what this decision was.

I do think, though, that a circumstantial case—also what most murder cases are, apparently—should not carry the death penalty. DNA evidence should be required in order to mete capital punishment.

UPDATE IV (July 6): Incredulous on FACEBOOK. G-d help me: an ex-juror thinks that, coupled with the body, the possibility of a mother giving her kid (whose body turned up in a garbage bag) whiffs of chloroform doesn’t go toward reasonable proof of serious malice, in a court of law. This is the first time I’ve researched Chloroform in my LIFE, and I’m a mom. Thing is: I’m honest; people on this thread are engaged in mythical thinking. I know, as a mother, how effing awful a two-year-old can be, and my own daughter was a blessing—a sweet child by comparison to most American kids. As sweet as she was, she could drive me to distraction, and I was an evolved, married, non-partying mom …

UPDATE V: Imported from Facebook:

I’ve never watched Nancy Grace in my life. Now a lot of pundits, without explaining what irked them about the evidence implicating the only plausible suspect in the violent death her of daughter, are using this verdict to show-off their commitment to the Constitution. What a crock. Which relevant sections in this document would a conviction have violated? “The CSI Effect” captures this trial.

I do agree with the issue of overreach: the prosecution should have gone with a lesser charge and not sought death. “We’ll never know who killed Calley,” says Sean Hannity. Come again? I hope he gets that interview he’s bookers are probably seeking as I write. So is anyone here going to detail one-by-one the bits of evidence presented which they did not find credible? Is there perhaps a lead that was not followed? Another suspect? A violent boyfriend who was crazy about the narcissistic creep called Casey, and just had to have her for himself?

UPDATE VI (July 7): Some of the comments to this blog continue in this vain: “Rah-rah, revolution man. I’m so cool. I’m anti-government, and anti-authoritarianism. Therefore, the jury is cool. And anyone who goes against the state, even if the state presented the facts, is cool.”

As the libertarian who coined the verb to Nifong, and who was perhaps the only libertarian to defend Michael Vick based on propertarian principles, and one of the few to defend Michael Jackson—readers with attitude don’t impress me much. Facts sway me, not cool factor.

A July 4th Toast To TJ & The Declaration

America, Founding Fathers, History, Political Philosophy

THOMAS JEFFERSON. “The Declaration of Independence—whose proclamation, on July 4, 1776, we celebrate—has been mocked out of meaning. To be fair to the liberal Establishment, ordinary Americans are not entirely blameless. For most, Independence Day means firecrackers and cookouts. The Declaration doesn’t feature. In fact, contemporary Americans are less likely to read it now that it is easily available on the Internet, than when it relied on horseback riders for its distribution.

Back in 1776, gallopers carried the Declaration through the country. Printer John Dunlap had worked ‘through the night’ to set the full text on ‘a handsome folio sheet,’ recounts historian David Hackett Fischer in Liberty And Freedom. And President (of the Continental Congress) John Hancock urged that the “people be universally informed.”

Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, called it ‘an expression of the American Mind.’ An examination of Jefferson’s constitutional thought makes plain that he would no longer consider the mind of a Mitt Romney, Barack Obama, or the collective mentality of the liberal establishment, ‘American’ in any meaningful way. For the Jeffersonian mind was that of an avowed Whig—an American Whig whose roots were in the English Whig political philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. …

… Jefferson’s muse for the ‘American Mind’ is even older.

The Whig tradition is undeniably Anglo-Saxon. Our founding fathers’ political philosophy originated with their Saxon forefathers, and the ancient rights guaranteed by the Saxon constitution. With the Declaration, Jefferson told Henry Lee in 1825, he was also protesting England’s violation of her own ancient tradition of natural rights. As Jefferson saw it, the Colonies were upholding a tradition the Crown had abrogated. …

Naturally, Jefferson never entertained the folly that he was of immigrant stock. He considered the English settlers of America courageous conquerors, much like his Saxon forebears, to whom he compared them. To Jefferson, early Americans were the contemporary carriers of the Anglo-Saxon project.”

The original Independence-Day column in its entirety is “A July 4th Toast To Thomas Jefferson And The Anglo-Saxon Tradition.”

Where Was Coulter On … Economic Freedoms, Asks Vox Day

Ann Coulter, Bush, Debt, Economy, Federalism, John McCain, libertarianism, Republicans

My WND colleague Vox Day wants to know “where was Miss Coulter when the McCain-Palin ticket suspended its Republican presidential campaign to help the Bush administration collude with the Democratic Senate to ram TARP down the throats of a protesting American public?”

“Cowering frauds,” writes Vox—with reference to Ann Coulter’s term for libertarians who do not want a department of marriage affairs to be added to the Federal Frankenstein in enforcing morality—“is a term that is best reserved for Republicans, who preach fiscal responsibility while repeatedly raising the debt ceiling, who talk about the importance of respecting the law while permitting Wall Street to openly violate it at will, and who claim to advocate personal freedom while staunchly supporting a futile Prohibition that saw three times more Americans arrested for drugs last year than were arrested in 1980.”

Check the WND archives for the two months leading up to the 2008 presidential election. Miss Coulter was too busy cheering on the Red Faction of the bifactional ruling party in a futile attempt to elect John McCain to bother speaking out against the Republican elite’s rejection of economic reality, small government principles, the U.S. Constitution and the American people. On the other hand, WorldNetDaily’s two libertarians, Ilana Mercer and myself, wrote no less than 10 columns attacking TARP and the treacherous Bush bailouts during those two months. When viewed from this perspective, Ann Coulter calling libertarians ‘”cowardly frauds” looks rather like Anthony Weiner calling Pope Benedict XVI a perverted exhibitionist.

Revere Paul Revere the Pioneering Metallurgist

Affirmative Action, Barack Obama, Bush, Business, Capitalism, Founding Fathers, Free Markets, History

Our president (Barack Hussein Obama) and his predecessor (George Bush), ponces both, could learn a thing or two from Paul Revere, not least about industry, inventiveness, and the source of prosperity.

The success of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, in 1860, about “the story of ‘the midnight ride of Paul Revere,’ erased from popular [Palinist] memory not only other riders who had warned that General Thomas Gage was on his way, but also Revere’s extraordinary career as a gifted artist, brilliant entrepreneur and pioneering metallurgist.” (TLS June 17, 2011, p. 30.)

The excerpt is from The Times Literary Supplement review of Robert Martello’s MIDNIGHT RIDE, INDUSTRIAL DAWN: Paul Revere and the growth of American enterprise.

In chronicling the life of Revere, a craftsman and an extraordinary artist who became an industrialist and a tycoon, the author concludes that Revere was,

an example of Benjamin Franklin’s conclusion that men who invent “new Trades, Arts, or Manufactures, or new Improvements in Husbandry, may properly be called Fathers of their Nation”.

To listen to MSNBC’s Chris Matthews wax prolix about the object of his carnal excitement (Barack Obama), this president is the embodiment of American achievement. However, Obama, like his predecessor, was admitted to the country’s finest institutions based, in all likelihood, on a preferential system. BHO has only ever lived off the parasitical avails of the political process. George Bush, of course, was the recipient of opportunities and privileges rooted in his being born to one of America’s inherited dynasties.