Facts are indeed stubborn things..

[ddeclue]

The following was an Op-Ed I submitted to the Orlando Sentinel last week which they apparently do not plan to publish regarding the Casey Anthony trial:

To the Editors of the Orlando Sentinel:

While defending the hated British soldiers of the Boston Massacre on trial for their lives in December of 1770, John Adams stated famously that “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence”.

Many here in Orlando now and around the nation today, indeed many talking heads on TV are blaming the jurors in the Casey Anthony trial for their not guilty verdict yet those jurors took the only proper course of action available to them, however difficult and unpopular, thereby preserving one of our most basic rights in a democratic society:

The jury voted to acquit the defendant because Adams’ stubborn facts simply were not proved at trial by the prosecution.

The prosecution asked the jury to infer a motive based almost entirely on a photo of the defendant’s tattoo – two words in Italian which leave a lot to the imagination. Those two words certainly were not an explicit confession of motive and have plenty of innocent interpretations having nothing to do with the alleged crime.

The prosecution further asked the jury to accept a rather incredible means of death, duct tape after administration of chloroform when it could not produce anything more than that someone in the defendant’s household had allegedly searched for information regarding chloroform on the internet. It could not produce a container of chloroform, a receipt for chloroform, nor any signs that the defendant had actually manufactured chloroform.

A smoking gun it was not.

Nor did the prosecution connect the defendant to the duct tape or even establish that the duct tape itself was capable of forming the air tight seal capable of asphyxiating the alleged victim.

For that matter the prosecution was unable to establish the proximate cause of death whatsoever.

Nor could it establish a murder scene, nor a time line, ergo it could not establish that other potential suspects did not have the opportunity to commit the alleged crime. Indeed given the inability to establish time and place, anyone living in Central Florida during the summer of 2008 theoretically had opportunity and certainly any member of the defendant’s family potentially had the necessary opportunity.

Motive. Means. Opportunity.

The prosecution lost because it failed to prove the basic, necessary facts of motive, means, and opportunity - much less prove beyond it reasonable doubt.

Instead of proving the facts, they asked the jury to adopt an unsubstantiated belief based on their passions against an unpopular defendant inferring guilt based on suspicious behavior alone.

In the absence of the prosecution’s failure to satisfy the burden of even the most basic elements of its case, the jury had no choice but to conclude that a reasonable doubt still existed and they had no choice therefore but to acquit.

We all owe this jury our thanks for performing a difficult distasteful civic duty and doing it thoughtfully and correctly in the face of tremendous media and public pressure to ignore Adams’ stubborn facts in favor of emotional and unsubstantiated belief.

Douglas J. De Clue
Orlando, FL

[MADem]

1. The "Off With Her Head" POV sells more papers, I suspect.

If you'd written a "Let's Hunt Her Down And Kill Her Like The Rabid Dog She Is" essay, you'd probably see your name in print!