On the Casey Anthony case....

Since the news broke while I am on the road, I feel it is okay to mention the Casey Anthony verdict, and my thoughts on it.
Our justice system isn’t perfect. Obviously we all feel like she got away with murder, but none of us really knows the truth. The same with the OJ Simpson case. It is still better to let a million criminals get away with their crimes than it is to send one innocent person to jail, or their death.
What needs to happen, in my opinion, is that the system needs a tweaking. As times change and modern technology evolves, it behooves us to make sure the system evolves with it. The cult of celebrity world that we live in (Remember—we so crave “celebrity” that when we run out of real celebrities, we create them from nothing. Hence TV like the Jersey Shore and reality cooking shows and…all of that folderol.
A side effect of that is this: people on juries now know that the case they are sitting on will be broadcast. They know that the media will be contacting them. They know a book deal looms, making them a quick fortune for sitting and answering questions from a ghost writer. There was a time, and the rule is still in effect, that members of a jury were supposed to have no prior knowledge of a case, or at least be as neutral as possible. In this day and age with every man, woman, child and parrot having a cell phone and internet access in their cereal bowl, it is impossible to guarantee judicial purity in the jury system. Television cameras are an aphrodisiac, and the bigger the case, the hornier these jurists get for the book deal and face time on the TV news. Can we stop it? I doubt it, at this point. If the laws change to stop the broadcasting of high profile court cases, there will be hue and cry from the media about censorship. Sometimes freedom of speech is used as a weapon…
So what to do? What can we do? Crimes will still be committed. People will still be murdered. Attractive women defendants will still be offered big bucks to show their bodies in slick skin magazines. Some moron will always hold up a marriage proposal sign in court when a Casey Anthony, or another attractive woman is on trial for some heinous crime. It is the world we live in, I guess. The bottom line looms large in all our lives and it takes a certain amount of integrity to ignore that bottom line and focus on what is really important in life. Do we think about how much money we can make from something ? Hey, if Casey Anthony is going to be rich, why can’t I? THAT mindset has to go.
And the system needs to go backward. It needs to return to the time when court artists were tasked with drawing the events in court, the lights and cameras were not present, and the juries and lawyers could focus on their jobs. I see Marcia Clark, OJ’s prosecutor, who, by the way, LOST her case, with her stretched out face on Court TV or whatever it is called now, and I see it as plain as day.
Wanna watch compelling TV? Put on Big Brother…..I mean…..Jersey Shore…I mean…oh, never mind.