Friday, July 8, 2011

A Casey Anthony Juror on Greta Van Susteren

I don't know how much longer this video will be available online, but I did think it warranted some attention from this blog.

Greta's interview with Juror #3

Wednesday, July 6, 2011

The benefit of sequestering a Jury

Casey Anthony is very fortunate that the Judge who presided over her trial had the wisdom to sequester the jury -- not just take jurors from a jury pool some distance from Casey's hometown, but to sequester that jury for the duration of the trial.  If not for that, Casey Anthony would undoubtedly be en route to death row.

Unfortunately, Judge Delucchi didn't have Judge Perry's wisdom and common sense.  Delucchi pretty much laughed off the need to sequester the jury on the pretense that they would have to be sequestered on Mars to do any good.  And the DA's office had their dirty hands in the effort to not have the jury sequestered -- with pages and pages of hundreds of witnesses that it never intended to call -- oh, yes, in addition to the 175 or so it did call.  The DA's office wanted to be sure the trial would seem to take so long that no one would want to serve on the jury if it was sequestered for that long.   The only one I can think of that would have been eliminated for that reason was #8, the teamster, and with what we know of his shenanigans and manipulations during the trial, that would have been a good riddance.

Why sequester a jury?  It's just common sense in a high-profile case that commands not only the print media but the airwaves as well.  Oh, and let's not forget the Internet.  Now, jurors can avoid googling the defendant's name on the Internet, but is it reasonable to expect that not a single juror has a home page that gives headlines of current national and local news?  Such as Yahoo, Google, and other home pages thousands of people access every day to retrieve their emails.  And how can jurors totally avoid radio announcements of news bulletins about the case -- must they NEVER listen to radio during the entire trial?  Same for TV.  And what about the newspapers on display at grocery store checkout lines?  Or along the sidewalks in front of stores?  What about family and friends that know the person is on the jury?  Delucchi actually believed that giving the jurors a warning not to discuss the case, not to read or see or hear the news reports about it, would be faithfully, 100% obeyed.  That's not naivety -- that's incompetence.  That Delucchi laughed off the need to sequester the jury demonstrates more than anything else his incompetence to sit as a judge in a high-profile, capital murder case.  Whatever virtue he brought to the bench during his many years of service certainly had vanished by the time he took over Scott's trial.

Surely no one that has followed the Anthony case can deny the immense emotional and financial investment the media has made in this case.  Just look at the reactions -- Nancy Grace is beside herself.  Just imagine, a jury had the audacity to not ask her opinion, but to make a determination based on the evidence as presented during the trial!  What is the world coming to?

What would jurors have been exposed to had they not been sequestered?  I didn't watch much of the news coverage -- I've long since lost the ability to stomach such incompetence and malfeasance passed on as "news" -- but I did catch one cable show about the case, and noted that a body language expert was explaining why George Anthony was telling the truth, and Casey Anthony was guilty.  And of course, the derision has already begun -- the jurors called idiots who believe the earth is flat.

Let's not forget that in Scott's trial during jury deliberations, the media were so concerned that Scott would be acquitted, or have a hung jury, that they provided lengthy discussions on the evidence the jury didn't see, just to be sure America knew an acquittal or a hung jury was the WRONG verdict.

Sequestering a jury in a high-profile case is a NO-BRAINER.  Can I say it any more plainly?  How about, DUH!