No Debt To Collect

It’s been far too long since I picked up the proverbial pen, or keyboard as it were, and there are a myriad of issues I feel compelled to address in our world as it stands today. But I’ll start with this…

I do not care for the suggestion, either direct or implied, by our pundits and social media participants that these Casey Anthony jurors owe the United States public an explanation. No juror owes me or you or anyone else an explanation. They do not owe anyone a press conference, or names or contact information or anything else. The deal we make with jurors is this: they perform their service and then they go home. That’s it.

If these people choose to discuss it, so be it. And if in doing so potentially let their service as a juror define the balance of their life, and potentially their family’s lives, so be it. But they do not have to, and we do not deserve anything from them.

I don’t envy those people. Take a moment and put yourself in their shoes. You know, from the get go, as a human being, that this woman is responsible for her child’s death. Assume for a moment the child actually did drown. That her mother failed to call 911 immediately, in my mind, convinced me of her guilt. I don’t care if she was molested or in any other way ill-treated. I know some horrible parents, and put in that spot any one of them makes the call to 911. Not making that call would have been a choice. And you take all that in on day one.

So you sit there, for weeks, hoping, begging with your eyes that the prosecution can bring this case home. But they don’t. They can’t. It just isn’t there. Did they fail? Did the police? They probably all did a little bit, in little ways.

So what are your choices during deliberations? Vote with your gut, or vote based on the rules of evidence as the judge has explained them? If you vote by the rules, you maybe send a murderer home, and you have to live with it. If you vote with your gut, maybe your gut is wrong. What if it is and you vote to send someone to their death? How do you live with that? We should not all be so cavalier when spared the weight of actual responsibility.

It is very easy to sit in the comfort of our homes, on our laptops and phones and pass judgment on these 12 people. But we haven’t walked a mile in their shoes. We haven’t even gotten off the couch. Agree with their verdict, don’t agree with it, and either way be happy you live in a country where you can do either. These people have no debt to us, and they owe you nothing.