JavaJennifer

Justice isn’t a cold glass of water served in a pretty glass to the thirsty masses.  Justice is the reluctant acceptance of an imperfect process that represents the best and worst of our legal system.  As Casey Anthony spends a few more days in jail serving out the terms of her entirely too-brief sentence, the volatility surrounding her release and the complexities of the feelings she engenders are fascinating.

As I watched this case take shape over the last 3 years I was certain of two things: Casey Anthony killed her daughter and Casey Anthony would embody what it means to be both not innocent and not guilty.

How did Susan Smith watch her car float into the water with her two boys strapped inside?  How did Andrea Yates drown her 5 children?  How do you leave your child locked in the back of your car on a hot summer day?  The better question might be, at what point did we start lying to one another about the difficulties of motherhood?

Isn’t is possible, likely even, that you can love your children with the whole of who you are and still have moments when you long for certain aspects of your life before you had them?  A few women I know are willing to get honest about this, acknowledging how those feelings can coexist alongside a love so great that they would rather die themselves than see their child harmed.

A mother I know slipped a tablespoon of Kahlua into her 4-year olds’ hot chocolate last winter because she “needed” her uncooperative child to take a nap.  Another mother confessed that she had dosed her non-coughing kid with some Tylenol with codeine to get her to go to bed early one night.  The women I’m referring to are  college educated and financially stable some of them with ambitious careers,  women now in their late 30’s early 40’s whose own mothers may have served them tea with a bit of whisky back in the day…

Casey Anthony is of a different generation, fed a steady diet of CSI and Law and Order where victims are chloroformed and live to testify in a tidy case that wraps up in an hour.  Her subsequent 84 searches on chloroform weren’t necessarily indicative of murder; it suggested  that this was someone fastidiously researching chloroform.

When you want to know the answer to something, you look it up one time.  But when you are researching something, you want to know everything about it.  And you look for it over and over.   Was chloroform relatively safe?  How would you dose someone with it?  What are the long term effects?   How long does it stay in your system?

For most of us,  using chloroform on another person is inconceiveable,  let alone on a child, but for a high-school drop out with the emotional maturity of a 16 year old, ill prepared for motherhood, living with an excitable, overbearing mother?   I had no trouble believing that Casey used chloroform so that she could go out and “party”.  Today’s chloroform is yesterday’s Benadryl.

The time frame for the chloroform searches further suggests that she had probably successfully dosed Caylee in the past.

This time… she got it wrong and Caylee died.

Panic.

And a choice:

Confess to using chloroform on your child and figure that no one will believe that yes, you meant to knock her out but no, you didn’t mean to kill her, that it was a horrible accident, OR do as you’ve done your whole life:  lie about it.

Though there was no testimony that Caylee was abused or that Casey was anything other than a loving mother, chloroforming your kid is not an act of love and would certainly qualify as abuse. The prosecution made what was, in hindsight, an unwise assumption that a jury would link Caylee’s death to abuse, be it isolated or perpetual.

And so begins the 31 day lie.  The ensuing party pictures were Casey’s ill-conceived attempts to show that she was unaware that Caylee was in danger because (per the lie) Caylee was with the Nanny.  She didn’t murder her daughter so that she could become a party girl.  She partied to substantiate her claim that as far as she knew, Caylee was initially fine and in the care of a Nanny.  At the point her parents discovered the car afoul and Cindy Anthony went bat-shit crazy,  the kidnapping lie started to both unfurl…and unravel.

But why chloroform Caylee in the first place?  If Casey wanted to go out and get her freak on, why not just take Caylee to her grandparents as she had done before?

Or better put:  How bitchy does your mother have to be before drugging your baby is a better alternative?

Mother/ daughter relationships are inherently complex but when the mother is now a grandmother behaving as a surrogate mother to her grandchild, the boundary issues in that family and the level of dysfunction was absolute.  The Anthony family, by all accounts was coming undone:  Cindy was constantly nagging Casey to get her shit together. Casey was tired of her mother interfering with raising Caylee but was simultaneously unable to get her aforementioned shit together.  They fought incessantly and with increasing and escalating verbal warfare.   Casey, lacking emotional maturity and sum zero in the sound judgment department likely thought, ‘Hell will freeze over before I let that bitch mother of mine babysit my kid’.  Caylee had become the only currency between them and I never ONCE heard Cindy Anthony take some small responsibility for contributing to an environment where between chloroform and Cindy Anthony’s shrill and unrelenting criticism, Casey chose the chloroform.

And after the horror of realizing Caylee was dead, a single piece of duct tape applied across that sweet face  further bolstered her claim that it was a kidnapping , was part of the lie, not an instrument of Caylee’s death.

Criminal defense lawyers will tell you that the “she died by accident in the family pool” defense strategy is something that you learn during your first year of law school.  When you have a client that that’s difficult to defend, you start running your fingers around the edges of their life looking for a weak spot.

Gathered around a table, Jose Baez asks, “Could Caylee have drowned in the family pool?” .  Not did she but could she.   I don’t know any reasonable person who thinks that baby drowned in the family pool.  But could she have?  Sure.  I didn’t go to UMKC for my degree.  I could have.  I lived 2 blocks from campus.  But I didn’t.

The Anthony home had an above ground pool, they admitted that they were sometimes careless with the ladder.    Could Caylee have climbed the ladder and drowned?  She didn’t drown.  But yes, she could have.

The defense obviously didn’t have to prove that Caylee died in the family pool which is one of the reasons why the jury didn’t convict on the aggravated manslaughter charges.  Even if you believe (as I do) that Caylee died by accident as a result of Caseys negligence, she didn’t die by accident as a result of drowning in the family pool.  Not just because she actually didn’t, but because there was no evidence introduced that supported the defense’s claim that Caylee died in that manner and therefore no way for the jury to convict on that charge.

People with narcissistic/sociopathic tendencies walk among us and they no more or less mentally ill than you or I.  They have a different set of criteria that serve as their compass in life.  When the State of Florida made this a death penalty case, they stopped trying to find the unique set of switches and pulleys that would have resulted in a full confession from Casey Anthony.  Doing so would have put the trial focus on the correct charges which, in turn, would have resulted in a conviction.  The State of Florida did a fantastic job, no criticism with respect to their efforts.  Though I’m confident that they had the right defendant, I’m not convinced that they were trying to convict Casey Anthony of the right crime.

You don’t reason with a sociopath.  And you don’t yell at a narcissist the way detectives from the Orange County, FL sheriff’s department are heard yelling at Casey Anthony on tape.  Casey had been yelled at by her mother for years and that had proved equally ineffective, particularly since yelling doesn’t play a factor in Casey’s matrix of reward and punishment.  The more you yell at Casey, the further into herself she retreats and the more apt she is to lie.

At the point when the State said in effect,  “You’re going to die by lethal injection”, they had effectively removed all motivation for Casey to cooperate.   If in fact, Caylee’s death was an accident, Casey believed that even had she told the truth from the very beginning, the result was the same: First Degree Murder with the possibility of the death sentence.  It’s one of the reasons why Jose Baez opposes the death penalty on both moral and legal grounds.  Moral, because, “we all need to stop and look and think twice about a country that decides to kill its own citizens. Murder’s not right no matter who does it, whether it’s a ritual killing or someone becoming a victim in a drive by shooting. It’s disgusting and I think, if this case gets any attention, it should focus on that issue” and Legal because it neither acts as a deterrent against capital murder nor does the threat of the death penalty elicit cooperation from the accused.

People lie for a variety of reasons and only one of them is because they are unwilling to bear the consequence of truth.  If you take a moment to reflect upon a lie that you told, a real whopper, you may discover that the lie had as much to do with the person that you lied to as it did whatever the particular lie was about.  Each of us has known people who made us want to be less than honest. Did you lie to protect their feelings?  Did you lie because you didn’t feel safe telling the truth?  Maybe you lied because you realized that people liked the lies better than the truth.  Or because in the act of lying you hoped it might become the truth.

Casey Anthony’s lies didn’t start with the death of her daughter.  She’s had a lifetime of untruths but what’s interesting about her as a practiced (if unimpressive) liar is her body language during  some of the testimony,  particularly related to the meter reader, Roy Kroink and a car that did or didn’t stink of human decomposition.  She seemed to, in turns, smirk, shake her head in disgust and feign boredom … because if there’s one thing that pisses off a narcissist it’s when people get it wrong…when we fail to be moved by the veracity of their lies.

On some level , Casey may have been willing to face a conviction, but not because some goofy meter reader moved Caylee’s remains 3 times over a nearly 6 month period, or because her mother perjured herself or because Casey left a bag of trash in the back of her car.  But what really seemed to raise her ire was her father’s testimony.

I’m not sure that George Anthony molested Casey but I thought that his conduct over the last 3 years was, creepy… and a little suspect.  The suicide attempt, the alleged affair with River Kruz…an inability to sustain eye contact during his testimony would have been troubling for me had I been a juror.  It doesn’t mean that he is in any way responsible but as 93% of communication is non-verbal, I think for the defense to not have seen and acknowledged his creepiness during closing arguments was a mistake.

It wasn’t the prosecution’s only mistake- they made several which given the 3 years they’ve had to prepare was a little surprising and for which they could have avoided by trying to figure out what actually happened to Caylee vs. trying to make the evidence they had elicit a conviction.

To be clear, there should have been a conviction in this case.  I absolutely believe that Casey is responsible for the death of her daughter and that she should have born the punishment for that through our legal system and not, as I now fear, at the hands of some whack job.

The First degree/ Felony murder charge, where the prosecution spent the majority of time building a case they were not able to prove was the State of Florida’s own contribution to the “miscarriage of justice” that Nancy Grace is going to be yapping about for the next 50 years.

Had the lead investigators and prosecutors used Casey’s narcissism to their prosecutorial advantage, I believe they would have succeeded in charging her with and convicting her of Aggravated Manslaughter of a Child: for causing the death of Caylee by culpable negligence (the chloroform).  The maximum sentence would have been 30 years in prison and it’s estimated that the minimum sentence would have been 16 years and 6 months with 3 years served.

Juries are willing to convict on circumstantial evidence.  The trial and conviction of serial killer Richard Grissom is an example of  a conviction where the evidence was at times either absent or thin- it wasn’t a death penalty cases.  And in order to understand what seems to have gone so terribly wrong in the trial of Casey Anthony,  it requires an understanding of the death penalty that goes beyond our biblical understanding of “an eye for an eye”, Exodus 21:24

Instead we are all waiting for that cold glass of water in a pretty glass to satisfy an unquenchable thirst for justice for the death of a little girl whose name we will never forget.

“God sees all, knows all, and can reconccile all. Into His arms little Caylee was delivered and ultimately by His hand those responsible will be judged and held accountable for their actions”- STC, Facebook, Tuesday, July 6th

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This entry was posted by javajennifer on Friday, July 8th, 2011 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Bitter Grounds, Blog Blend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.