Within minutes of the Casey Anthony verdict, much of America devolved into the mass media equivalent of a mob bearing torches and pitchforks. Twitter lit up with calls for vigilante justice, and proposals that we revoke the Fifth Amendment's protection against double jeopardy (or at least that we revoke it for Casey Anthony). Nancy Grace nearly spit fire, proclaiming, "The devil is dancing tonight." Conservative syndicated columnist Ben Shapiro wants to change the jury system entirely.
Even as DNA testing continues to exonerate wrongly convicted people, including people who were nearly executed, it's this rare case -- in which a jury recognized that there was no physical evidence linking Anthony to her daughter's murder -- that has America questioning its justice system.
This is a bad way to make public policy. In an interview with CNN, Crowder concedes that she didn't consult with a single law enforcement official before coming up with her 24-hour and 1-hour limits. This raises some questions. How did she come up with those cutoffs? Did she consult with any grief counselors to see if there may be innocuous reasons why an innocent person who just witnessed a child's death might not immediately report it, such as shock, passing out, or some other sort of mental breakdown? Did she consult with a forensic pathologist to see if it's even possible to pin down the time of death with the sort of precision you'd need to make Caylee's Law enforceable? Have any of the lawmakers who have proposed or are planning to propose this law actually consulted with anyone with some knowledge of these issues?
If medical science can't pinpoint the time of the child's death to the minute, how else are authorities going to determine it? They can't ask the parent. A guilty person isn't going to give you an honest answer, and even an innocent parent may lie if they fear the truth could land them in prison. It also seems safe to assume that a parent's first instinct upon witnessing the death of a child isn't to look up at the clock to take note of an official time of death.
Certainly it's easy to distinguish a body that's been dead for less than hour from one that has been dead for six or seven. Presumably, Crowder and the lawmakers supporting this bill put the cutoff at one hour to prevent someone who intentionally or accidentally kills a child from having time to cover up what happened. But if that's the justification, it's all the more important that a forensic pathologist be able to nail down the time of death to the minute. And that just isn't possible.
The portion of the bill that requires a parent to report a missing child within 24 hours is just as fraught with problems. When does that clock start? From the time the child actually gets abducted, gets lost, or is somehow killed, or at the time the parents noticed the child was missing? How do you pinpoint the time that they "noticed"? When teenager Rosie Larsen is abducted and murdered in the new AMC drama The Killing, it takes two days for her parents to notice she's missing. They thought she was spending the night at a friend's house, and she and her friends often rotated sleeping over at one another's homes on the weekends. The Killing is fiction, but this isn't an implausible scenario. Again, are we really so angry about the Casey Anthony verdict that we're prepared to charge grieving parents with a felony because it takes them longer than some arbitrary deadline to notice their child is missing?
The law and the attention it attracts could also cause problems of overcompliance. How many parents will notify the authorities with false reports within an hour or two, out of fear of becoming suspects? How many such calls and wasted police resources on false alarms will it take before police grow jaded and begin taking note of missing child reports, but don't bother investigating them until much later? How many legitimate abductions will then go uninvestigated during the critical first few hours because they were lost in the pile of false reports inspired by Caylee's Law?
The law will have at least one effect that Crowder and her supporters intend. Crowder's petition letter expresses her hope that once the law is passed, "no more innocent children will have to go without justice." And she's right. Caylee's Law provides another way for prosecutors to convict a suspected parent or guardian of something, even if they don't have the evidence to prove the actual murder. Florida state Rep. Scott Plakon, sponsor of the bill in his state, told the AP, "God forbid we ever run into a mother like Casey Anthony again. If we do, that mother will be a felon." I suspect this is why so many people have signed Crowder's petition. This is about vengeance. They're angry at this verdict.
That anger is understandable. But anger is a bad reason to make public policy. New laws, especially laws with serious criminal sanctions, demand careful consideration: Will the law actually address the problem it is intended to address? Is it enforceable? What are some possible unintended consequences of this law? Could it be abused by police and prosecutors?
In a country of 308 million people, bad things are going to happen. We already have laws against murder, child abuse, and child neglect. When you pass laws that make it easier to imprison people in cases where the state doesn't have enough evidence to prove the crime everyone knows they're actually prosecuting, you undermine the integrity of the justice system. The "flaw" that led to the Casey Anthony verdict is pretty straightforward: The state failed to prove its case. And the government must prove its case, even when all of America is 100 percent certain of the defendant's guilt, because we want to be sure the state will always also have to prove its case when we aren't so certain.
Of course, there's another reason we go through the formality of a trial before throwing someone in prison, even in "slam-dunk" cases like this one. Sometimes, even when Nancy Grace herself is completely sure that the bastards are guilty, we later discover that she was wrong.
Here are the interesting responses:
"The reason for this mass idiocy of raving for the head of Casey Anthony is not that we Americans are bad people. Not even the ones with pitch forks and torches.
No, the culprit here is the one who always stays hidden when something goes up in flames: the ones who CREATED the mob."
"Casey Anthony had a much fairer jury than trial. She was convicted of murder weeks before anyone ever presented any evidence. The proscecution riled up the whole nation to this girl who they said killed her child without ever having evidence, let alone the forum to present it.
I am stationed in Germany and I will tell You something that should make Americans spitting hate into the air and making a case in the so calles court of public opinion shrivel in shame. Germany has a law - and other nations have it too - that makes it illegal for anyone to incite unrest and violence. The reason for that law is obvious: The Nazis used that tactic to excess to make Germans act our of hatred against their fellow man. To prevent that from happening again they adapted a law from other nations that makes it illegal to incite unrest or publish hate speech."
"The jury did the right thing. The raving lunatics who have no idea what happened but want to kill someone anyway do not. "
"The idea behind this "Caylee Law" is what happens when emotions overcome reasoning. Yes, bad things happen in this society. Yes, sometimes those who probably did those bad things don't get punished. That's going to happen. No legal system is perfect and ours is no exception but trying little fixes here and there can just as often be a bad thing as a good thing. Emotion based decisions are not made with regard to possible consequences as this idea shows quite clearly. It's all about trying to avenge that which you can't avenge.
You are never going to get a guilty conviction for Cassey Anthony unless she kills her next child too. Making the legal system worse won't bring Caylee back to life. It just makes things worse. "
"I think what upset people most was that she got off on EVERY count involving her daughter. Manslaughter. Abuse. Neglect. Not guilty ".
"Neglect? Really? They couldn't logically conclude that a woman who failed to report her child missing (remember, her parents did that for her 31 days later) and instead went on a party circuit was somehow neglectful? Oh, but she claimed there was this baby sitter. Yes...the phantom baby sitter? And what parent, but a neglectful one, leaves their child with a baby sitter for weeks on end without checking in at least a half dozen times per day? So either way she wants to argue it, she was neglectful. And parents are charged and convicted all of the time for allowing their young child to wander out into the yard unsupervised to drown in the family swimming pool. So if you want to defend her with THAT argument, I've already refuted it for you. THIS is why there needs to be a law requiring parents to notify."
"why is it that anyone who writes about "those"who barely escape the death penalty or who were found innocent after being execute, or freed after spending 20-30 years in prison. they NEVER mention that THOSE PEOPLE are nearly 100% MALE, and that those people, like anthony, are nearly 1005 FEMALE. there was less evidence in the scot peterson case in california, and he's now on DEATH ROW.
yet we already have jurors and others calling cold-blooded casey a "victim." its such a justice process we have in place in this country.
women get away with ANYTHING and EVERYTHING and MEN are routinely imrisoned for ANYTHING and EVERYTHING.
So, Radley Balko, get your facts straight; just as you accuse those enraged by this serial fallacy of justice to do, involving yet ANOTHER murderous women let off by a jury, who now find HER to be a victim.
"THOSE PEOPLE" you speak of have a gender, RADLEY; it is nearly universally called MALE! "
"Yes if Casey's name was Cedric Anthony,the outcome would be different."
"This proposal is typical knee-jerk reaction we see far too often in this country. We DO NOT need more laws! "
And finally this comment :
"This is pretty good coming from a woman who doesn't even know where her own kids are."
I tried looking up Michelle Crowder, but couldn't find anything about her kids.
