FROMONLINE | 2011-07-17

  • By Tami Lange
  • July 17, 2011
  • 288
                        
Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her father forty whacks. And when she saw what she had done, she gave her mother forty-one. It’s sort of sick Mother Goose rhyme, about a double murder more than 100 years ago in Fall River, Massachusetts. According to regional folklore, it was made up to sell newspapers. In reality, it is wrong. Neither Andrew Borden nor his wife took that many axe blows. Abby Borden was not Lizzie’s mother, but rather her stepmother. Most importantly, Lizzie Borden was never convicted of killing either of them. More than a century later, there is still a good deal of conjecture as to what went on that hot August morning. That Lizzie and her father had a strained relationship is certainly true. That she resented her stepmother also was not disputed. She had tried to buy poison the week before the murders (supposedly to clean a seal skin cloak) and she burned the dress she allegedly wore the day of the murders. History has tagged Lizzie Borden as guilty. She remained a spinster and forever was shunned by Fall River society. She has come down through history as an example of the ultimate angry child. The criminal justice system did not find her guilty. There were other suspects, like the mistreated maid and a shady illegitimate son. Could Lizzie really been physically capable of the fury? Could a woman really be capable of killing her own father? Does it really matter that Lizzie was never convicted in a court of law, since she was obviously convicted in the 1892 court of public opinion? And so we come to Casey Anthony, who hasn’t been found guilty of doing anything more than lying to investors about the death of her 2-year-old daughter. Did she kill Caylee outright? Was she at least responsible for the girl’s death? A jury could not find that she was guilty, at least beyond a reasonable doubt. I don’t think there’s much argument that Casey Anthony probably wasn’t the mother of the year. That she was a self-obsessed young girl who told a lot of lies and had a dysfunctional family life is pretty much undisputed. But that Casey Anthony walked about of Florida jail last week and into the rest of her life is not a failure of the criminal justice system, but rather a triumph of it. It proves that the accused is innocent until proven guilty. It proves that a jury of your peers may carefully listen and consider the evidence and come back with a not guilty verdict, in spite of facing an unlikeable defendant and some shady circumstantial evidence. The case also proves that Nancy Grace does not get to convict people at will, nor does People magazine, nor does the mob of “experts” who more often than not do not have all the facts. Like Lizzie Borden, Casey Anthony will probably always be guilty in the court of public opinion. Fortunately for all of us, that’s not the court we depend on. If the jury would have found Anthony guilty, she could have faced the death penalty. That would have meant any unlikeable defendant who “seemed” guilty could have been fair game for the electric chair or the needle. Is that the justice system you want? One that relies less on facts and evidence and more on personality and media and mob mentality? If that’s the system we end up with, how long would it be before an innocent person actually was convicted (and perhaps sentenced to die) because of who they were and not what they did or did not do. If the system is to work for us, it has to work for Casey Anthony, too. Wooster Weekly News columnist Tami Lange can be reached via e-mail at tam108@hotmail.com.


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