There is no doubt that when a criminal case becomes a trial of national attention, it is because there are some details that have made it extreme, or out of the ordinary. However, a not guilty verdict from a jury in a famous trial over a violent crime carries the same legal weight as a not guilty verdict from an unknown trial for a crime that is easily dismissed as understandable.
Casey Anthony has been the most recent subject of a kind of mob-mentality that has made an average woman recognizable across the country. While safety concerns were raised over Sunday’s release from custody, the newly acquitted mother was escorted safely to what remains an undisclosed location.
In yesterday’s interview with Geraldo Rivera, one of Anthony’s representatives spoke out on her behalf, asking the nation to honor our system of justice, based on the Constitutional rights of citizens. “We need to start respecting the jury verdict and decisions that the juries make,” he told Geraldo.
People are given the right to a fair trial, their chance to prove their innocence and it must be noted that the opposite is true. The prosecution also received a fair trial, a chance to prove the accusations that they made against a person.
Although Anthony received her not guilty verdict on the charge of homicide, she now faces a new struggle. She must try to start over in a world that has been turned upside down for her, a change that may require psychological therapy to deal with according to experts. “Everything she has been through, that’s more than most people can deal with in a lifetime,” an opinion from one such expert weighing in on the situation.
Source: Fox News, “Casey Anthony’s Attorney: We Need to Start Respecting the Verdict,” 18 July 2011