Justice And The Casey Anthony Trial

February 23, 2012 Opinion No Comments

By Norman Berdichevsky

We have all been taught a myth, reinforced in such films as Twelve Angry Men, and many similar Hollywood creations that the guilt of the accused must be challenged if the person charged with a heinous crime is a woman, a racial or ethnic minority, illegal immigrant, disabled or gay person no matter how conclusive or what type of evidence.

This was documented in what must still rank as the most damning indictment of our so called criminal justice system by Tammy Bruce in The Death of Right and Wrong.

Bruce was the Director of the National Organization For Women for a decade and openly a lesbian and therefore a heroine of the Left until she refused to abase her sense of morality, decency and common sense and had to think outside the box. In so doing, she issued a challenge to the cultural elites of this country that has never been refuted but only emerged in even sharper and more grotesque relief since the book was published in 2003.

The Casey Anthony case has only lent her words the aura of a prophet without honor in her own country…..”The Left elite has worked for years to brainwash us into a sort of ‘values lobotomy’; ….We are to blame the innocent and lionize the guilty.” (p.17)

The trial reached a new low in the lengths to which defense attorneys are willing to go including what must be the total denial of the principle of “innocent until proven guilty.”

Without a shred of evidence and in contradiction to his many years of service in police related work that speaks on behalf of his character, the father of the accused, George Anthony, was accused in the opening statement (along with the brother of Casey Anthony) of sexual abuse of his daughter and of being a co-conspirator in the death and hiding the remains.

Although the Judge later instructed the Jury to avoid all these allegations, the fact remains that in our system, people who are not charged with any crime can be the subject of libel, slander, insult and humiliation before a televised audience of tens of millions of people.

The angry and tormented comments and expressions of disgust on the faces of hundreds of passers-by at the Court House are duplicated across this country by a moral majority that realizes the truth of these words and the abomination of the defense team’s celebration of their “victory.”

In the Anthony case, Casey does not speak – the most damning evidence of all for people whose innermost being expects (and yearns for) a mother to state with total conviction “I DID NOT KILL MY CHILD.” The provisions against being forced to testify and our Fifth Amendment were instituted to prevent the possibility of torture but no one can deny that the innocent victim must have a RIGHT and DUTY which is even greater – to speak out in their defense.

What I do know and have the advantage of knowing is that in many parts of the world including democracies with respect for human rights and time honored age-old distinguished judicial systems, the grotesque results and single minded addiction of our courts to protect the rights of the accused are regarded as conducive to miscarriages of justice.

Norman Berdichevsky

I lived and worked in England for seven years and had several occasions to act as an interpreter in court cases. The one that left the strongest impression on me demonstrated the fallacies of the Anthony trial in the jury’s conclusions regarding what it considered the lack of MATERIAL EVIDENCE or EYE-WITNESSES.

The charges against two accused Danes (each of whom accused the other for organizing and instigating the crime) for smuggling hard drugs into the U.K. from Turkey resulted in a three way trial (the Prosecution against both of them and each one against each other). Each one had his own lawyer defending himself and trying to find evidence with which to convict the other one. These two had operated as partners in crime until they were apprehended.

I will call the two Arne and Bent. Arne was in his late thirties and ran a night club in Copenhagen. He had previously been arrested and charged for smuggling drugs but had not been convicted. He was quite well off with a considerable income and money in the bank, He traveled widely and spoke several foreign languages (and pretended not to know English, a fact I uncovered during the trial but could not reveal). He had made many prior trips to Turkey and was known to the Turkish police as a dealer (based on hearsay). His girlfriend was a successful lawyer in Denmark who had helped him beat several raps before.

Bent was a 20 year old high-school drop-out, the classical ‘loser’, who lived with his parents in a small boring, provincial town, had no employment prospects and been receiving the standard generous Danish unemployment and welfare benefits for some time. He knew no foreign languages and had never traveled outside of Denmark.

Bent was caught in possession of a considerable amount of drugs (they were in his suitcase). His fingerprints were on the plastic bags containing the drugs. All the tickets and travel receipts for his trip and stay in Turkey were in his name. He explained that when he and Arne were arrested upon entering the U.K. at the airport, Arne had made a sign of slitting his throat and had warned him in Danish that if he revealed Arne’s role as the instigator, he could expect to be killed.

Bent’s parents (who knew no English and were grateful to have the service of an interpreter so that they could follow the trial) explained to me how he had been the patsy and duped by the promise of easy money working for Arne.

Arne’s lawyer took pains to convince the jury that his client simply befriended Bent on the journey and helped show him the sights. He stressed again and again that the case against Arne was completely ‘circumstantial’.

In this case at least ten of the twelve jurors needed to agree on a verdict. Although this is permitted in certain cases in a few American states, it is the exception to the rule that unanimity is required. The judge explained to the jury (echoing the summation of the case by Bent’s attorney) that the expression “circumstantial evidence” was to be understood as the preponderance of evidence that all pointed in the same direction excluding other reasonable inferences of alternative explanations.

The jury took a very short time to reach a verdict finding both defendants guilty of the charges but with a 11-1 vote against Arne and a 10-2 vote against Bent. The judge commended the jury and sentenced Arne and Bent to 5 and 3 years imprisonment respectively.

The jury members knew from their own life experience that even without material evidence (fingerprints, DNA or whatever), Arne had to be the instigator and that it made no sense to suppose that Bent could have undertaken such a venture without direction, encouragement, instructions, and funding. No other interpretation made sense (common sense).

Nobody has said it better since Tammy Bruce wrote a decade ago: “We must ask ourselves when did defending the accused before a jury devolve into attempting to deceive the jury on behalf of the accused? When did the right to a defense turn into a sport where lawyers count ‘wins,’ where getting a client off, regardless of guilt, became the goal?

Norman Berdichevsky is a native New Yorker who lives in Orlando, Florida. He holds a Ph.D. in human geography from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1974) and is the author of The Danish-German Border Dispute (Academica Press, 2002), Nations, Language and Citizenship (McFarland & Co., Inc., 2004), Spanish Vignettes; An Offbeat Look into Spain’s Culture, Society & History (Santana Books, Malaga, Spain. 2004), An Introduction to Danish Culture (MacFarland, 2011) and The Left is Seldom Right (New English Review Press, 2011). He is the author of more than 200 articles and book reviews that have appeared in a variety of American, British, Danish, Israeli and Spanish periodicals such as World Affairs, Journal of Cultural Geography, Ecumene, Ariel, Ethnicity, The World & I, Contemporary Review, German Life, Israel Affairs, and Midstream. He is also a professional translator from Hebrew and Danish to English and his website is here.