Casey Anthony and Her Many Judges

Before this week I had no idea who Casey Anthony was.

Then, all hell broke loose in the form of a not-guilty verdict. A jury decided that this young mother was not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of killing her two-year old daughter. All that could be proven was that she had tried to hide her daughter’s disappearance and had not informed the police about it. If she didn’t murder her daughter, then she apparently lied to the point that it cost her daughter’s life. The public, it seems, is having none of it, and it’s hard to blame them. After all, it seems to defy all reason: why would a mother who loved her daughter keep the authorities from trying to protect her?

The public had been following the case on TV and the internet for several years now and felt as if they had a pretty firm grasp on Casey Anthony and her guilt. They understood her story well. She was a young, stressed out mom who simply couldn’t take the tribulations and responsibilities of motherhood any longer. So she did what any unreasonable, psychotic, self-obsessed mom would do. She took care of the problem.

That story-line was easy to grasp. After all, we’ve seen variations of that story in the narratives that we embrace. But this story was different: it was real. It had the benefit of actual stakes, and that caused the public to care deeply. After all, a little girl had died. All that needed to happen now was for the justice system to give her the fair trial that even a murderer deserves and then convict her. The death penalty would be preferable. They were patient.

But the justice system screwed it up. Meanwhile, Casey Anthony weeped joyfully, hugged her family, and mouthed the words “Thank You,” to her lawyer. Now we’re rethinking our belief in the justice system, and we definitely hate lawyers. In the midst of our shock and outrage, Christians became so preoccupied with expressing ourselves and using the situation as a teachable moment about the need for justice that we forgot to explore the subject with grace. We embraced our defaults.

We defaulted to the assumption that Casey Anthony must be one of two things: a wonderful, caring mom who is wise and blameless in the face of tragedy, or a horrible, villain of a woman who actively caused her daughter’s death. We simply refused to allow a category for the proposed alternative: a mother who realized her daughter is missing and dealt with it in an incredibly unwise, unlawful way because she lost her ability to cope. Instead of being willing to empathize with a mentally unstable mother, we do everything we can to draw a line between her and us.

We would never do something like that, we tell ourselves. But we deny the fact that many of us, when we are about to be caught for something we did or didn’t do, often feel a natural impulse to cover our tracks. Since Adam and Eve in the garden, this has been the way of mankind. If  her daughter did simply go missing, it certainly seems like she may have felt guilt (understandable for any mother whose child has gone missing when under their care) and responded wrongly, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that she killed her daughter.

We defaulted to judgment – a stance that simply isn’t ours to take. The jury was given the responsibility of thinking, discussing, and committing wholeheartedly to a verdict based on the very best arguments on both sides. This all takes place within a system that is built to exclude irrelevance, sensationalism, and assumptions. The jury was tasked with the weighty job of judgment. In our justice system, the burden of proof was on the prosecution, and the jury (now experts on this case in a very real sense) found that proof lacking.

The only other judgment that is relevant here is the judgment which God promises he will carry out – when all is made right and all pain and suffering is made purposeful. It’s a judgment that actually rids the world of evil, that actually heals, that actually edifies. It’s a judgment that we simply do not have to offer. When we respond to a perceived injustice with our own brand of public outcry and shaming, we only exacerbate the sinful state of our world. We color it with anger, frustration and ugliness. We demonize human beings and make them out to be monsters.

Before this week I had no idea who Casey Anthony was, because her story, whatever it truly was (only she and God knows it seems), was a personal one. Not a public, social, or national one. In a couple of years we will have moved on to the next big murder suspect and forgotten about Casey Anthony and any supposed impact her case made upon the justice system or culture itself. Hopefully by then the church will have learned to focus instead on those we know for absolute sure to be criminals: ourselves.