THE ANTHONY MURDER VERDICT

JULY 7, 2011
OCTAVE OF THE FEAST OF THE PRECIOUS BLOOD



With stunned disbelief I listened to the verdict in the Casey Anthony Florida murder trial. I knew the prosecutors had overcharged with the murder one indictment, but I certainly thought that aggravated manslaughter would be easily enough rendered. My shock lasted only a few minutes, just until I heard one of the alternate jurors make a more startling statement, to wit that the general reasoning, which focused on motive --- a factor not required under the law actually ---  [the] jury [his implication] could not grasp how "such a good mother" could murder her child, and thus concluded she did not. Faulty reasoning because the major premise, "such a good mother" appears to be quite awry from the known facts.

Immediately the outrage was heard throughout the land and not surprising at all, of course. And almost as immediately the legal pundits weighed in with their analyses, some of it based on what one of them referred to as the CSI factor; I don't watch that show, but  have heard of it. As I understand matters, the characters are involved with finding evidence in pursuit of the real culprits in a case, usually murder. Since the advent of DNA testing in real cases and the spurt of popular crime shows where technology is more and more used to prove guilt or innocence, much of it a bit far-fetched, at least for now, it seems that the public at large has unreasonable, unrealistic expectations as jurors. This was the gist of some of the expert opinion, and I am inclined to agree with this assessment. Our whole culture has become unreal, unmoored from truth and its consequences, with emotion trumping reason all too often. Television has become more real than life as it exists itself. So this latest version of jury nullification ought not leave us jolted any longer. Proof beyond a reasonable doubt has been transformed into absolute proof or nothing. Any doubt cast by aspersions or theories from the defense that conflict so as to spread confusion like a contagion is now considered too much doubt to deal with. "If it doesn't fit you MUST acquit" syndrome.

There were other aspects discussed, such as the ability of the defense team to spin doubt in the minds of the jurors with the cobweb of lies and distortions it put out as I just referred to. After the verdict one of the defense attorneys was heard to express his anger that the media had "painted his client as a s-------." Truth be told, no one had to do this or need even try, and no one did, for Casey Anthony's actions declared her unfitness for motherhood among other disturbing behaviors, whatever the jury may have thought according to that alternate, one of the minority of men on the jury, which was composed of more women than men. And this brings me to the woeful heart of this sordid affair in American jurisprudence or should I say disprudence?

One of the woman jurors said that she had a clear conscience because the case was composed of unproven theories in so many words. She wanted just something to use for conviction she said, meaning she knew Anthony to be guilty. Well, that is what a circumstantial case is based on; unless we have an eyewitness or a confession, most cases are circumstantial and rely on evidence coupled with reasoned theory, not purely speculative, because there are no witnesses and sometimes DNA and other forensics cannot prove with 100% certitude; in fact there would be few convictions if we applied her standard.

Does she honestly think that the police and the DA's office go around trying to arrest and convict the innocent as a general rule? Scott Peterson, if he were female, would be free today if this juror had sat. In the Lacey and Connor Peterson deaths there was no proven means of death just like Cayley Anthony. This juror apparently did not consider that, and reasonably, too, although she could not vote to convict for the murder 1 charge, she had other options, such as aggravated child abuse or manslaughter. If chloroforming one's daughter in order to party is not child abuse I do not know what child abuse is. And who else used the chloroform? Sure chloroform traces can be found from innocent means, but what normal mother goes on the web to research chloroform unless she thinks she needs it? Who else had the motive? If the child died by accidental drowning, then why the need for duct tape over the baby's mouth and nose? Why the lying to cover it up and failing to report for a month? How much proof is required now? What message does this send to other like-minded sociopaths? Convicting her of manslaughter insures her life is spared, if some unthought of aspect appears later, the case can be reopened. Since she lied to authorities so grievously, jail time for quite some time seems appropriate enough. Legal eagles say that the prosecution promised what he could not deliver; well, the defense did the same. I cede that it is the prosecution that has to prove the guilt and not the defense; however, circumstantial cases go like this and when reason prevails, a [now convicted] liar and sociopath would not be given such wide berth, if he were a man [Scott Peterson]. At least the deliberations would have taken more than a day to really consider all the evidence. In fact it can be said without any exaggeration that the lies of a female sociopath were her trump card of all ironies. Because she lied so much and was so demure in court, out of character for her, she was able to outfox the truthful prosecutor, known for being honest. This is what we have come to. Witnesses testified to her good mothering; but then sociopaths are good at charming others and drawing them in to the point of view of the sociopath. Scott Peterson was thought to have been a good husband until after the fact. He was so believable! Yet he is on death row today, because he is a man. If Stacey had aborted her child, Connor, or killed him as a young boy she would not be given a death sentence, as the Susan Smith case reveals. Woman are rarely given the death penalty even for gross murder, but when they are it is not for killing their own children. The fruit of abortion.

I have heard no commentator in the media allude to this, so detached from the natural law we have become in just a single generation, thanks to the Roe v Wade decision and all its hideous "progeny". Without realizing that he had, assuming he sincerely did not intend to reveal so much, one Fox legal analyst with his own show was adamant that women should not be given the death penalty for killing their children. I could read between the lines, subconsciously he tied it to the "right to abortion" which he clearly upholds, although there is no such right ontologically and naturally, it is all a legal fiction. Any lawyer who no longer recognizes the natural law as the bedrock for all positive law is no kind of lawyer at all. The natural law and reason are intertwined by necessity, for the natural law is naturally known by reason. Discard one, lose the other in time, it is unavoidable. We are now so detached from the horror of the aggravated child abuse that is abortion, that life is rendered cheap in the hands of women who destroy their souls as they defile their bodies to kill that of another, an innocent baby, a child in his own right. Men cannot abort babies they do not carry so they are not given the same psychological default line when we think of social and legal policy. But woman are; young children are simply thought of as extensions of the developing child in the womb on some level we may not yet articulate as I am doing here. This assertion may seem bold to you, even shocking, however, ask yourself why a quasi-medical social journal was able to run an article by an expert advocating the "right" to kill toddlers if the parents desire to. He did not loose his standing in his field and where was the uproar? You did not hear of this, you say? Well here is the answer to the question about outrage. You did not learn of this because there wasn't any. Policy wonks and pro-lifers like me are the only ones who knew and as far as I know I am the only one who knew of it that was alarmed. This, too, is the fruit of abortion.

Down deep we all know, except for the very young who know nothing else and are the victims of prejudicial soul-ravaging propaganda, that abortion is a great evil, the great evil of our time because it is so massive in scale; in fact the human mind cannot grasp the enormity of it all unless the conscience is willing to signal immediate remedy. This would take just too much time and effort for most of us, so we have habituated ourselves to a schizophrenic duality: on the one hand 51% of the country says it is pro-life and wants reduced abortion [not all of it, mind you, so much for being pro-life], yet we still have abortion. We simply seem to want it to just go away, have the moral crisis sort itself out on its own. Compare this to the efforts of the Tea Party in re economic policy and the success they are acclaimed for. As I wrote in another column, "guts for gas but no pluck for the preborn!"

Before children are despoiled and deformed in the government schools, even they recognize the baby in the womb as a real live baby. I know with certainty because of my work demonstrating with the graduated fetal model display we sometimes use. Instinctively a little one will unclasp her hand from her mother and run up excitedly to the display and with great excitement exclaim, "Look, a baby!" Indeed. And we who were educated before the all out assault on normalcy in the public school re-education internment camps, know it, too. We really, really do. And since the preborn child, who is always called a baby when the mother wants to give birth and only something else when she does not, looks so much like the baby you first hold in your arms, perhaps a little smaller and with less hair and more "wrinkles" under the surface where we are not always conscious of it being so, we associate the one with the other so easily, because it is normal to do so, for human life, human personhood,  is a continuum. No Supreme Court can change this with any edict, although the country as a whole pretends that it can. This is why we experience such a duality in our national character and why abortion is the sine qua non dividing line, not class, not race, not gender, not anything else, but abortion. Everything else hinges on it. Those who are actively supportive tend to be the same with "gay marriage" and court "legislation" versus Congressional legislation since the courts have become so liberalized and thus political, not strictly constitutionally based.  So to quiet our fears and salvage what is left of our shattered consciences we blame those who point out this ontological truth to us, rather than blame ourselves for our quandary. If abortion is not child abuse, the other forms become somewhat less appalling on some level, if not completely as yet. Ergo the dichotomy in our so-called best in the world justice system, men are given harsher penalties with the same evidence or less against them than women are, and please, oh please, do not offer the occasional exception---there is always one, because this, too, is a normal part of life.

Abortion is not only the death penalty without a trial for the innocent, it is the very means by which we now make war on ourselves as a society, by reducing the normal and the pure to a quaint status versus the abnormal and the depraved, so that now we accept the no-fault apology, the medical excuse for sin and other intolerable behaviors. Everything is the opposite of what is ought to be. As we accept---throwing up our hands in fake horror, more and more dislocation and the redefinition of normalcy, we are hardened and coarsened, become only a shadow of the dignity that the human person was created with. In this glass darkly we can but reason hesitantly and haltingly, if at all, because to do otherwise would mean we would have to change, and we are now super-addicted to everything that is our five ring national circus, and we would rather slay all social mores rather than kill the grotesque. The absolute, horrifying fruit of abortion!




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