People v. State

We’ve all heard of the CSI Effect, the theory that watching CSI on television causes people who later sit on juries to unrealistically expect more from prosecutors than just the testimony of a jailhouse snitch before they’ll convict.

I wonder what effect watching on television the public vilification of the jurors who rendered the not-guilty verdict in the Casey Anthony trial might have on future jurors in future cases. As Juror No. 12 told her husband before going into hiding: “I’d rather go to jail than sit on a jury like this again.” But hey, why go to jail or into hiding when you can just convict?

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First, Norm Pattis:

Two things struck me from afar about why the defense won this case, and both come down to rules broken by Casey Anthony’s lawyer. If Mr. Baez had tried the case according to the textbook, he might well have lost it.

According to Norm, these two unconventional things were: (1) laying out in opening statement and arguing for in summation a theory of how Casey’s daughter died, even though he kept Casey from testifying and wasn’t able to offer any actual evidence supporting this theory at trial; and (2) arguing to the jury that the case against Casey was not strong enough to support a penalty of death, even though punishment is not supposed to be a consideration during the guilt phase of trial.

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I always root against the State, except perhaps in the rare case when the State prosecutes one of its own.

As Lew Rockwell writes (in a post quoted by the Atlantic):

I wonder: even if this woman were guilty, what is to be gained by turning her over to the greatest killing, torturing, and looting machine on earth, government, as if it were some moral authority? We need private judicial proceedings, restitution and not retribution, and not exaltation of the dullards and thugs who compose government. It is never right for them to judge anybody on anything.

This attitude is consistent with, rather than contrary to, my view (for which I’ve been excoriated a fair amount in the criminal defense blogosphere) that the role of the criminal defense attorney is to “do justice,” notwithstanding my acknowledgement that losing for those we think innocent is more devastating than losing in general.

Doug Berman:

By turning this case into a capital prosecution, prosecutors ensured jurors would have to be “death qualified” and thus would know from the outset that prosecutors wanted Anthony executed for her alleged crimes.  Though sometimes death-qualified juries may show a greater willingness to convict, here I suspect that the death-qualification process could have primed the jurors to expect a forensic smoking gun showing conclusively that Casey Anthony murdered her daughter in cold blood.  When no such smoking gun was presented by the prosecution, the jurors may have ultimately been much more willing (and perhaps even eager) to find reasonable doubt on all serious charges.

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