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Tuesday, July 5, 2011

No Justice for Caylee Marie Anthony

For those of you in Florida, and around the United States who have been living under a rock and are unfamiliar with the State vs. Casey Anthony murder trial, let me get you up to date. Just over three years ago, a beautiful little girl in north Florida was reported missing, and her skeletal remains were found six months later, tossed in the woods like a piece of trash. The child's mother Casey (22 at the time) as it turns out had known her daughter was missing for over a month, without reporting it to anybody. She fabricated lies and elaborate stories that she told to her parents and investigators - all the while she was out partying while spinning a web of lies. She lied to police, made up a story about a fictional nanny who 'kidnapped' her little girl, and later fabricated a story about an accidental drowning. However, somehow I can't connect an accidental drowning with finding the remains of a 2 year old, with duct tape over her mouth, wrapped in trash bags, and buried in a wooded area. Why go to such lengths to cover up an accident? Casey Anthony has been in jail for three years, as the main suspect in her daughter's disappearance and death. This past month, millions of us have watched the trial unfold, and her web of lies sag and fall apart.

We learned that Casey's mother finally reported her grand daughter missing. We learned of computer searches on things such as 'chloroform', 'neck breaking',which were deliberately deleted from search history. We then learned that Casey's mother Cindy claimed she was doing those searches. Later yet, we learned that Cindy Anthony was at work at the times those searches were performed on her home computer, proving that she perjured herself. We saw testimony from Casey's father, a retired police man, that upon picking up his daughter's car he smelled the very distinct smell of decomposition in the trunk of her car. Why would a father, lie about that? If anything instinct would have you protect your child, not accuse her. Yet that seems not to matter to a jury. Nor did the fact that Casey Anthony lied to detectives on multiple occasions, failed to report her daughter missing, had partaken in a hot body contest, AND gotten a tattoo reading 'Bella Vita' (Beautiful Life) in the span of time that her daughter was 'missing/kidnapped.' She then told more lies, and claimed an accidental drowning. I am not a mother, but as a woman, maternal instinct is bred into me. People deal with grief in different ways, but the last thing that would be on my mind would be to get a tattoo depicting how beautiful life is, when in fact a grieving mother would be more apt to have thoughts along the line of "life is so cruel and unfair. I need to find the monster who took my baby away from me." But then again, I am not Casey Anthony. I did not sit in a court room, stone-faced while my father wept - testifying about the smell of decomposition in her car while his grand daughter was missing, and recalling the suicide note he wrote to loved ones before attempting to take his own life. I did not sit in a court room, expressionless while a meter reader testified about sticking his meter stick into the eye socket of my child's remains.

Today, after less than 11 hours of deliberations, a jury found Casey Anthony not guilty of first degree murder. Not guilty of aggravated child abuse. Not guilty of aggravated manslaughter of a child. And guilty on four counts of lying to authorities. According to yahoo news, "Anthony will be sentenced by the judge on Thursday and could receive up to a year in jail for each lying count. She has already spent almost three years in jail awaiting trial."

Seven years. Seven years in return for murdering your child and tossing her away like yesterday's trash. Yet people are punished more severely for drug convictions, affecting nobody but themselves. The judicial system failed miserably on this one, folks. So all of the evidence was 'circumstantial' and not 'physical.' I disagree with the verdict 100%. In some cases, as such, the truth is there, in the web of lies that this unremorseful mother has spun. Untruths that were proven. This case is sadly going to go down in history as one of the most unjust verdicts we have seen, along with the likes of the O.J. Simpson case. Accept in this case it is more sickening and heart-wrenching, in that a mother callously cheated her own flesh and blood of what could have been a beautiful life. And she dragged her family though the mud in the process, in front of the World, with little to no remorse. She gets a slap on the wrist.

I sincerely hope with all of my heart, as a HUMAN BEING - that Casey Anthony, every single one of those jurors and defense attorneys, and anyone else who knows that this verdict was wrong are haunted by their decisions. I hope the guilt they feel consumes them like a giant fireball - destroying them from the inside out. But more than anything, I hope that our legal system in the future can find a way to prevent letting cases like this slip through the cracks due lack of physical evidence when it is so plain that the defendant is guilty of a crime this horrible. It literally makes me sick to my stomach, that this woman will be laughing in the face of the legal system - knowing that her daughter paid the ultimate price, her life, for simply not fitting into her lifestyle. If you are mature enough to be a mother, you are mature enough to put your life on hold for long enough to make one smart decision and put an unwanted child up for adoption if he/she does not fit into your lifestyle. Someone else, be it a woman unable to carry a child or a gay couple, would have done everything in their power to have given that child a beautiful life.

Bella Vita....the irony.