The Dark Shadow of Sexual Abuse: Did Casey Anthony Get Away With Murder?

Yesterday, in Orlando, Florida after two days of deliberation, jurors found Casey Anthony not guilty of an array of horrifying charges, including first-degree murder of her 2-year old daughter Caylee Anthony, manslaughter and child abuse. Anthony was convicted of four counts of lying to police, which is likely to get her a prison term of four years (or much less, due to time already spent behind bars) –not so bad, considering she was facing the death penalty.

The shocking verdict is a nod to the power of what might be called "suggestive sympathetic projection." Anthony’s defense attorney Jose Baez, implying that Casey may have been the victim of family sexual abuse, successfully instilled enough doubt and sympathy into jurors’ minds to apparently lead them away from common sense, arriving at a virtual acquittal. Tangled up in rhetoric and the agonizing confusion of the conflicting messages between the competing attorneys, jurors believed that the prosecution’s lack of knowing exactly "who what, where, when and why,” combined with the possibility of imprisoning a victim of child abuse for the rest of her life, made not guilty the only palatable verdict.

The case against Casey Anthony has been a source of mass attention since 2008, when Casey’s mother, Cindy Anthony, made a hysterical 911 call in which she said her granddaughter had been missing for a month. During the call, she famously said, “There is something wrong. I found my daughter's car today and it smells like there's been a dead body in the damn car."

More evidence quickly piled up against Casey Anthony, who, the media revealed, had partied and had “La Bella Vista” tattooed on her shoulder during the 31 days her daughter rotted by the side of the road. Her friends and boyfriend testified that she did not act depressed or concerned, but celebrated during that month of freedom.

Anthony’s celebratory behavior was not the only instance of circumstantial evidence. The case against Anthony relied heavily on a tangle of evidence, including Casey’s repeated lying to police and family, her Google searches for neck breaking, head trauma and how to make chloroform, and a “rare” brand of duct tape, as well as a heart-shaped sticker, found on both the corpse and in Casey’s home.

The defense called the prosecution’s suggestion that these circumstantial factors added up to murder a “fantasy.” Amazingly, the defense also attacked the air sampling evidence that put decomposing flesh and chloroform in the trunk of Anthony’s car as “voodoo science.”

The prosecution asserted that 25-year-old Casey Anthony chloroformed her daughter, duct-taped her mouth and tossed her in a bag before dumping her body in the woods near their home. The prosecution's case was further limited, however, by their inability to determine definitively just how, when and where  Caylee had died. To that end, the defense had their own scenario: Caylee had accidentally drowned in the pool.

The case against Anthony seemed solid until, in a genius appeal to human emotion, the defense painted Casey Anthony as a victim; the pretty, promiscuous prisoner with a strange, dark past of sexual abuse -- in this case incest.

First, the defense asserted in opening statements that Anthony's father, George Anthony, and her brother, Lee Anthony, subjected Anthony to a lifetime of molestation. Anthony lied to police not because she was guilty, but because she was brought up in a twisted world that thrived on lying, the defense said. It was really her sexually deranged father -- the one responsible for Anthony's post-dead-child-partying behavior – who told her to hide Caylee’s body after she accidentally drowned in the pool.