Nancy Grace on Casey Anthony

According to the Huffington Post, Nancy Grace of the Nancy Grace Show on CNN is personally appalled at the verdict in the Casey Anthony trial.
It seems to me that an appropriate response to a headline like this is profound indifference. Who cares what Nancy Grace thinks about the Casey Anthony case?
Of course, lots of people do care. I know because when I was combing through the day's news items, “nancy grace casey anthony” was the number one trending search on Google this morning.
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of Nancy Grace’s opinions, however, and why they matter to people, let’s run through the Cliff’s Notes of the Casey Anthony trial--just in case you haven’t been following it.
Anthony, 25, was accused of knocking out her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee, with chloroform, suffocating her with duct tape, stashing her in the trunk of her car, then dumping her in the woods.
The defense claimed that Casey Anthony, who lied about several details regarding the disappearance of Caylee, came from an abusive family and that her father covered up Caylee’s accidental drowning in the family pool by dumping her body in the woods.
On Tuesday Casey Anthony was found not guilty of all charges except lying to the police.
Nothing about this case is clear. There are no good guys. The grandparents are clearly as bent and narcissistic as their female offspring. All of them do their best impersonation of human beings, but end up looking little better than mirror-gazing monkeys miming outrage and remorse.
Something is clearly missing in that family.
In a just universe Casey Anthony would have been genetically incapable of reproduction.
If conscience was truly universal, or even better, God-given, then she and her family would never sleep peacefully again.
Unfortunately, it’s not a just universe, and nothing is God-given save what we give God.
Enter Nancy Grace.
Pundits like Ms. Grace are designed to stand in for your average Jane Q. Mom. Everything about Ms. Grace, from her sensible post 40s hairdo to her judgmental but vaguely righteous gaze, shows she is a surrogate for the modern day white middle-class mother.
Of course, in order for her to be a proper representation of the ideal American mom, she has to be imbued with the right amount of institutional authority. No problem, not only is Ms. Grace a snap judge of character mixed with a dollop of moral outrage, she is a bona fide lawyer.
Mother knows best plays best with a J.D. following your name.
There’s no particular problem with this sort of substitution, I suppose, but it’s important to realize its limitations.
Our justice system is finely tuned to avoid snap judgments and unjust prosecutions. It fails at that sometimes, and sometimes it swings too far in the other direction, as it may have done in this case.
I want someone to pay for Caylee Anthony’s heinous murder too. But we have juries to protect against emotional judgments. Neither mothers, fathers or victims get to decide who is guilty. If they did, a lot more innocent people would fall at the end of a rope.
Bad judgments just come with the territory.

What do you think of the Caylee Anthony verdict? Does Nancy Grace have a right to be angry?Tell us in the comments.

'Chlorophyll' & Mother's Love May Save Casey Anthony

The Casey Anthony trial took a surprising turn today when Anthony's mother Cindy Anthony said that one of the most compelling pieces of evidence against her daughter -- a Google search for "chloroform" -- was actually her doing. She claims she was doing a search on chlorophyll after her dog ingested some bamboo and that prompted her to look up chloroform. The question: Is she telling the truth or would she do anything to save her daughter, including commit perjury?

It seems very different from the statements Cindy Anthony made originally and the very statements the prosecution hinged their case on. For instance, now she says the stain in the trunk of Casey Anthony’s car was old, so old, in fact, that it was there when they bought the car in 2000. Prosecutors are saying the stain was caused by leaking fluid from Caylee’s decomposing body. Puts a pretty big crimp in that one, no?

In addition, prosecutors allege that Casey used chloroform to kill her daughter and the search was part of that evidence. Now what can they do?

I will say that as someone who was fairly convinced of Anthony's guilt at the beginning of this thing, this is starting to cast some doubts for me. If Cindy Anthony is telling the truth, then it would call the state's entire case into question.

If she isn't, then that would be no big surprise. After all, who among us would not do anything to save our child's life? Given that Casey is charged with Capital Murder, she could be doing just that.

Of anyone in this case, Cindy Anthony is by far the most sympathetic. She clearly felt the most for her little granddaughter, called 9-1-1 first, has cried the hardest on the stand and even mouthed the words "I love you" to her daughter after her daughter claimed that her father had been abusing her for years.

But is she telling the truth? It seems doubtful. On cross, the prosecution laid into Anthony, pointing out that she was at work during those searches and that the Internet progression showed visits to MySpace, on which Casey was very active.

The irony to all this is that Cindy Anthony seems willing to do anything, including possibly lie, to save her daughter while Casey Anthony, if found guilty, would have been willing to do anything to get rid of hers.

This case is compelling because of the human elements, because this family is so dysfunctional and yet hard to stop watching. It is an unimaginable, senseless tragedy for everyone, but perhaps no one so much as Cindy Anthony.
Do you think she was lying?