In the OJ Simpson trial the jury discarded forensic evidence and basically acquitted him for Mark Furham's past and his lies.
In the OJ case, the jury distrusted the veracity of the officer who was in charge of the evidence, and therefore distrusted the evidence.
Exactly so. Once you introduce real doubt about the handling of evidence, the evidence as presented is almost beside the point.
Something to note, though, is that Simpson's "dream team" brought a lot of expertise and focus to bear on jury selection and arguably accomplished something there in terms of a friendly jury.
That isn't the case in the Anthony trial, beyond the norm for jury selection. They even impaneled at least one person who has a police officer in the family - I've been called up for jury duty four times, and I've never seen a defense team let either someone with police in the family or someone who identifies as having been the victim of a violent crime be seated.
^ We can take some solace in this, though: Whether or not Casey killed her daughter, she will have to live with it for the rest of her life. Murder, negligent homicide, or just being a stuck-up flighty bitch...whatever she's done, that'll be the monkey on her back until the end of days.
It might be comforting to think that she feels guilty over Caylee's death but there's no way to be certain that's the case.
Yep. And I don't know about you, but I've known more than a couple of people who seem to live comfortably with being "stuck-up flighty bitches" without finding it too much of a back-monkey.
Frankly, if Anthony is indeed as bad as some have painted her then she's probably so lacking in empathy and the ability to form human connections that guilt feelings are not going to be a big part of the equation.
Why did Anthony lie about the whereabouts of Caylee for a month?
Most likely because she knew something horrible had happened to the child and that she was going to be in big, big trouble if it were found out. Since she's a pathological liar - she's got an adult history of lying for no reason at all, about almost anything, "lying when the truth would do as well" as the saying goes - obviously lying when she'd done something bad or participated in doing something bad would be her natural response.
None of which comes anywhere close to providing a scrap of evidence, much less meeting the legal burden of proof that she committed premeditated murder. To find twelve people irresponsible enough to convict on the evidence presented would, in retrospect, have been pretty remarkable (and awful).