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Justice

The media frenzy and general public outcry arising from the acquittal of Casey Anthony has raised a major ethical issue:- If "everybody believes" that Casey was the person who killed her her child, was the jury wrong in concerning itself with the legal technicalities, such as the absence of any substantial evidence linking Casey to the murder. She claimed that her father was implicated in the child's death, and the jury considered him as a completely unsatisfactory witness, and that seemed to have given rise to the "reasonable doubt" that the jury had, and which ultimately caused them to opt for acquittal.
Accepted:
July 15, 2011

Comments

Sean Greenberg
July 16, 2011 (changed July 16, 2011) Permalink

I think that the issue raised by the Anthony case is more directly bound up with the philosophy of law than with ethics more generally. Indeed, the justification for the verdict seems to reflect the nature of American law in particular, which holds that in a criminal case, guilt must be established "beyond a reasonable doubt." In the Anthony case, the inability of the prosecution to establish the cause of death was an especially important factor in the jury's verdict. What's crucial in this context, is the standard of evidence required for a guilty verdict, which is set quite high in order to try to give the accused the 'benefit of the doubt'. Regardless of whether all the evidence seems to point towards Anthony's guilt, the jury was quite right strictly to insist that guilt be established "beyond a reasonable doubt": this insistence does not reflect a misplaced concern with legal technicalities, but rather a commitment to the letter of the standard of evidence in American criminal trials. Despite the not guilty verdict in this case, the verdict should not be taken to establish Anthony's innocence: if the case had been tried in Scotland, the verdict 'not proven' (as opposed to 'not guilty' or 'guilty'), might well have been rendered, but this verdict is not an option in American criminal cases. Regardless, then, of whether Anthony is actually responsible for the death of her child, in light of the evidence, it seems that a proper verdict was rendered, one which is completely in keeping with the appropriate standards governing the trial.

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