Emotions run high in Casey Anthony murder trial.
Concluding its third riveting, fast-paced, much-viewed and even more analyzed week, the Casey Anthony murder trial continues to fascinate Americans and a worldwide audience, who according to Dr. Drew Pinsky, “Just cannot wrap their minds around the idea that a supposedly loving mother could so cold-heartedly, cruelly murder her own child.”
Casey Anthony, 25, is on trial for killing her two-year-old daughter Caylee sometime around June 16, 2008, and then callously disposing of her badly decomposed body in a swamp near the Anthony family’s Orlando, Florida home. The case first drew nationwide attention approximately a month after Caylee’s disappearance, when Casey finally admitted to her mother she did not know her daughter’s whereabouts, and the case grew increasingly sensational and bizarre as Casey Anthony wove a tangled web of lies and took investigators on a series of wild goose chases until the toddler’s body finally was discovered in October, 2008. The Prosecution has charged “the tot mom” with first degree murder, indicating it will seek the death penalty if the jury finds her guilty of the crime. Prosecutor Linda Drain Burdick faces a considerable challenge in proving Ms. Anthony’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, because she has no conclusive forensic evidence to establish Ms. Anthony had means, motive, and opportunity for committing the crime.
Ms. Anthony’s bizarre behavior during her daughter’s absence both captivates and mystifies spectators and analysts, and the prosecution has attempted to capitalize on her wild partying, participation in “hot body contests,” and ostensibly carefree attitude during the mysterious thirty-one days as proof she wantonly killed her child out of a desire to lead a free and footloose life. For every salacious image, however, the defense can offer a contradictory photograph of Casey and Caley laughing and loving, the portraits of love and joy. The defense suggested in its opening argument Casey’s father, George Anthony, and her brother, Lee, had molested her, and she is suffering “child abuse accommodation syndrome”—a variety of PTSD characterized especially by pathological lying. In strictly legal terms, Ms. Anthony’s psychological condition does not signify so long as she could distinguish between right and wrong at the time of the crime. Several television psychologists have suggested, “If she is a textbook sociopath and ‘malignant narcissist,’ then she knew right from wrong and just didn’t care.”
Televised live on CNN HLN and its sister network “TruTV,” the case has drawn unprecedented ratings as women especially are tuning-in for all the grim details. Competition for limited seating in the courtroom gallery has become dangerous and occasionally violent. On Friday, police and paramedics had to subdue an especially unruly crowd and carry away one would-be spectator on a gurney after a scuffle broke-out. “When you watch the trial on television, you can believe it is a fiction,” one spectator told HLN’s Doctor Drew, “But when you see it in person, it becomes very real and very emotional.”
Brooke Sommerfield, a Southern California child advocate, explains, “Linda Drain Burdick is building her purely circumstantial case piece-by-piece, as she must, and she is counting on the jurors to assemble the pieces into the same vision of the crime that she sees.” Noting the exceptional difficulty circumstantial cases pose, Ms. Sommerfield continues, “No matter how well she builds her case, Linda Drain Burdick has no evidence that puts the murder weapons in Casey Anthony’s hands; she has no witnesses to testify they saw Casey commit the heinous crime.” Commenting on the evidence and argument, then, Ms. Sommerfield concludes, “The prosecution has shown us all the gruesome details of Caylee Anthony’s death and disappearance, but they never have shown us who did it…if, in fact, anyone ‘did it’.”
