AN OPINION ON ALL THE CASEY ANTHONY OPINIONS:

I have neither interest nor opinion on the Casey Anthony acquittal.

No offense to those who followed the trial. It is interesting. We all love a “truth-is-stranger-than-fiction” tale. (My weaknesses are natural disasters and survival stories.)

I do have an opinion on the reaction to the acquittal, though. The word that best describes this reaction: visceral. On Facebook, folks are lamenting how stupid we Americans are, or at least twelve particular Americans, and how broken our system is, and how really terribly awfully difficult it was to watch that terrible awful woman’s reaction to the verdict that frees her.

I’m thinking: why are you watching then? Why does her reaction matter to you? Who can judge a human’s reaction to the announcement of her fate? . . . I repeat, the system is set up to err on the side of letting the guilty free. It stinks, sometimes. The murderer gets away with it, sometimes.

That fact is proof that the system is still working.

We should be more alarmed about an unchecked prosecuting government than an unhinged partying woman who may have killed her own child.

Cold? Maybe. But it’s cold comfort for the innocent whom the state still managed to wrongfully convict, even under the “reasonable doubt” standard.

Which is worse? The guilty going free, or the innocent getting convicted? As a liberty lover with a healthy suspicion of state power, I say: the innocent getting convicted.

Read the whole thing.

Plus, a related question: “The last time you were summoned to Jury did you go or did you look for an excuse to duck it?”