Rants and Chants

After reading “Tearful Anthony jurors ask prosecutors, where was the evidence?”, I was even more flabbergasted by their reasoning and felt the need to write this posting. The Anthony jurors are a sad sign of our times. We now live in a time where we have come to take every doubt, no matter how improbable, as reasonable. We are unable to apply deductive reasoning to connect pieces of evidence without being spoon fed every minute detail in an unquestionable way (and what can’t we question these days?). If you can manage to kill someone without one or more direct eyewitnesses, your chances of a jury acquitting you are higher today than they were a hundred years ago.

The Anthony verdict and the juror’s squeamish sentiments immediately brought to mind a far different jury from a famous case from a century ago. The case of Chester Gillette standing trial for the murder of Grace Brown often has been referred to as the first “trial of the century” of the 20th century. It garnered international press coverage at a time long before radio and television. It also provided the basis for both Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and the film A Place in the Sun.

On July 11, 1906, at Big Moose Lake in the Adirondacks, Chester Gillette rented a rowboat and set off for a day on the lake with Grace Brown. While they were unwed, Grace was pregnant with his child and lobbying him to marry her. Chester had a suitcase and tennis racket with him. The next day, when they had not returned, a search party found Grace’s body under the water, with the rowboat capsized nearby. Grace’s face had cuts on it. Two days later, investigators found Chester Gillette in a nearby town. Despite the two days, Gillette had not reported Grace’s death and was merely continuing with his holiday in the Adirondacks as if nothing had happened. At first, he said he knew nothing of her death. Then he tried to explain it as a boating accident. Then he tried to explain it as a suicide. With his story continually changing, authorities arrested Gillette.

There were no eyewitnesses to the actual murder in either the Gillette or Anthony cases. The evidence in both cases was circumstantial. Moreover, in the Chester Gillette case, forensic science was still in its infancy. It was only in 1906 that the New York City Police Department began regularly fingerprinting criminals, a first in the United States. Compared the Anthony case, with its hair banding and air samples, the Gillette case was tried more purely on the circumstances of Chester Gillette’s actions and behavior and Grace Brown’s resulting death and physical condition.

So why did the Gillette jury find him guilty, while the Anthony jury acquitted her? I believe it comes down to two things:

1. The Chester Gillette jurors clearly understood something that the Casey Anthony jurors had lost sight of:

In crime, people only lie for two reasons: to protect themselves or to protect someone else. Either way, lying makes them complicit in the crime.

In the Chester Gillette trial, jurors understood that he repeatedly lied to cover something up. The something in question was his involvement in the death of a woman. Therefore, he murdered her. They didn’t need DNA. They didn’t need computer searches. They didn’t need blood. They didn’t even need the suspected weapon, his tennis racket, which he had conveniently discarded. Did the defense raise doubts that it was an accident or suicide? Yes, but if it was an accident or suicide, why did he not report it and why did he lie when confronted? Those are not reasonable doubts given his lying. In addition to his changing explanations of what happened, he had also been registering himself at the hotels under false names, lying about his identity to cover his trail leading up to the murder. The more reasonable conclusion is that he was lying to cover up her murder.

The Anthony jury did not take that next logical step. Based on finding her guilty of lying to the investigators while her child was missing, Casey Anthony should have gotten at least a manslaughter conviction. If not to cover up her own involvement or knowledge of someone else’s involvement in the death of her daughter, then to what motive do the Anthony jurors ascribe to her lying?

Casey Anthony was unwilling to cooperate with investigators to tell them the truth by identifying what really happened and/or who really did it. Instead, she told them lies. Casey appears to have remained unwilling to cooperate by telling prosecutors the truth in exchange for a plea deal. Finally, Casey did not take the stand in her own defense, explain her lies, and provide any new truth to exculpate herself.

2. We have become so worried about the rights of the accused, that we would rather acquit a guilty person than convict an innocent one — but we have reached a point where we now seem to be doing the former far more often than the latter. It’s as if children just magically die and their bodies are found in the woods and no one did it.

CSI levels of evidence and mutually conflicting “expert witnesses” have us at the point where we treat any doubt, no matter how absurd, as “reasonable.” Who does the jury think searched for chloroform and why? How does the jury think the Pooh blanket and laundry bag got from the Anthony home to the woods where her body was found? How does the jury explain chloroform (which had been searched for online) in air samples from the trunk of Casey Anthony’s abandoned car?

Did Casey Anthony have the motive? While she seemed to be a loving mother by the photos, videos, and accounts of friends and family members, bear in mind that few people photograph or videotape the bad moments with their kids. Moreover, Casey has lied — the jurors even found her guilty of it. So why should we trust that she was such a good mother? There are just as many, if not more, photos of her cavorting about at parties and bars. She clearly wanted to live a freewheeling lifestyle. That’s hard to do when you have to be a responsible parent. It’s also hard to socially connect with other young twenty-somethings, especially attractive single men, when you have a toddler cramping your style. The jury didn’t buy that?

Did Casey Anthony have the means? The duct tape matched a brand at the Anthony household and the Pooh blanket came from the Anthony home, as did a laundry bag, both found with Caylee’s body. For some macabre reason, someone in that household searched for chloroform and neck breaking – and it was not Cindy Anthony. Casey was taking gasoline and borrowing shovels. In addition, if she didn’t want to use chloroform or duct tape, she could have just as readily taken Caylee out to the pool for a swim and drowned the poor girl there in a matter of minutes. While we cannot know the exact cause of death because of the degree of Caylee’s decomposition, these other items of evidence show a variety of means available to Casey.

Did Casey have the opportunity? If not on the last day that Caylee was seen alive, then certainly sometime during the 31 days before Cindy Anthony reported her missing, yes, Casey had plenty of time during that window to kill her daughter in a matter of minutes, bag up the body, and conceal it until depositing it in the woods.

Do I know exactly how Caylee Anthony died? No, I don’t. But I believe prosecutors presented enough evidence that it is reasonable to conclude that Casey lied because she either killed Caylee or she is covering up how Caylee died – and that makes her complicit in Caylee’s death, which is at least guilty of manslaughter. Moreover, nothing in the defense raised enough reasonable doubt in me to conclude otherwise.

Nevertheless, the Anthony jurors seem unwilling to accept the most probable explanation and the evidence that does support it as “reasonable” or “undoubtable.” Such is the New American Tragedy and A Place in the Sunshine State.

Resources:

I’ve found the Casey Anthony coverage at the Orlando Sentinel to be very comprehensive.

“The Murder Trial of Chester Gillette” at The Historical Society of the Courts of the State of New York

“The American Tragedy” by Douglas MacGowan at truTV

“Chester Gillette and Grace Brown” by Craig Brandon, author of Murder in the Adirondacks: An American Tragedy Revisited.