Not Guilty?

Please don't think I am minimizing the awful feelings so many have toward tot mom Casey Anthony, but the second thing to come to mind, right after the OJ verdict, when her verdict came down was Bart Simpson, who has escaped justice for years and years by this simple credo:

"I didn't do it, nobody saw me do it, you can't prove anything."

Everyone is so upset, hollering that the jury didn't do this and the defense did that and the prosecutor should have done thus and such, and it would be good to remember this basic fact:

Casey Anthony was not on trial for being a liar, or a party girl, or even a bad mother. 

She would probably agree, in her heart of hearts, that she is all of the above.

The prosecution needed to get twelve people to believe beyond the shadow of a doubt that she killed her little girl.  They did not do this.

Casey was on trial for killing her little girl, and the prosecution failed to prove that she did that.  Just like a tenth-grader who has 101 excuses for a lousy grade in Algebra (The room is too hot.  The room is too cold. I'm too close to the chalkboard.  I can't see the chalkboard from where I sit. The teacher has it in for me. The other kids hate me. I missed class because I got suspended for truancy...) all it took was for Casey's mouthpiece, José Baez, to muddy the waters enough for the jury to admit that they had some doubts. 

Also, Casey was not on trial for not being properly distraught while her daughter was missing, nor for not being grief-stricken once the little girl's remains were found.  There is no law, except that ethereal quality of common decency, forbidding the mom of a murder victim from getting a "La Bella Vita" tattoo, or going out dancing and doing the Horizontal Two-Step.  All that was easy enough for the defense to explain away- everyone deals with tragedy differently, they said.  Add the well-served, but not proven, allegations about her father molesting Casey earlier in her life, and about him possibly having an affair while the search for Caylee went on, and the jury stopped blaming Casey and started blaming her father, who was made to look like a bad guy.

I don't know what kind of guy he is.  I don't know what kind of woman Casey is, or her mother.  I don't know what kind of woman Caylee would have become, but I do know that she will never have the chance to find out for herself, and I don't know who took that chance away from her.

Twelve men and women say it wasn't her mom.