Casey Anthony Found Not Guilty

This was Casey Anthony as defense rested the case.  Since then, the jury’s been in deliberation, and, moments ago, returned the verdict of Not Guilty of 3 charges of first-degree murder, child abuse, and aggravated manslaughter.  They found her Guilty of counts 4 through 7 of providing false information to police. So that’s the punctuation mark to a tragic death and an awful, if compelling, spectacle.  What do you think? Is Not Guilty the same as Innocent?

If you’d like to see the verdict read yourself and the poll of the jury, here’s the live stream from the Washington Post.

Comments

  1. Ken Isaacson

    Is “Not Guilty” the same as “Innocent”? Not in the least. This is unfortunate for anyone who’s been wrongly accused. Not so bad for those who’ve been rightly accused but get off because the prosecution dropped the ball.

    Curious what others here think: Not Guilty because she didn’t do it? Or Not Guilty because prosecution didn’t get it right?

  2. Terrie Farley Moran

    Innocent is in the heart. Not Guilty is a public judgement. Two totally different things.

  3. Heather Waters (redline_)

    Still in shock. Wow.

    @KenIsaacson — In my own very biased opinion, it’s not guilty because the prosecution could only work with what it had–very little forensic evidence b/c the murderer is smarter than your average criminal, and lots and lots of lying.

  4. Clare 2e

    I know that juries often take their instructions very seriously, which is a good thing. So, regardless of any hunches, they’re asking themselves the technical questions of proof and evidence as they’ve been laid out by the court. That’s as it should be–if that’s what happened here– but as some other people pointed out, if she was found guilty of 4 counts of lying to police, what was she bothering to lie about? It seems to me, with that oddity tossed in, that the jury may be indicating that the prosecution just didn’t get all the way there.

  5. Christopher Morgan

    But the thing is she admitted to lying to the police. I think their defense consisted of saying “we wanted to hide our kids drowning by making it look like homicide.”

    Now I didn’t follow the case as well as some, but I have been under the impression that they never had much of a case against her beyond acting all sketchy and a ton of circumstantial. Did the girl probably do it? Yea, but this should be a lesson to all the Nancy Grace’s out there that try to preach guilt prior to trial. This in turn riles up public opinion, driving the state to push a case that can’t stand up to a solid defense team.

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