Brian Dickerson: Did Nancy Grace assure Tot Mom Casey Anthony's acquittal?

Some credit a wily defense team; others blame prosecutors for miscues real and imagined. Or maybe jurors simply took their job seriously and refused to make the extra-legal leap of faith demanded by those in the bleacher seats.

But let’s not ignore the obvious: Casey Anthony’s murder acquittal simply wouldn’t have been possible without Nancy Grace’s intercession.

Grace is only one woman, of course — one among millions of Americans in whom little Caylee Anthony’s death stirred something primal and personal, and for whom her mother’s murder trial became a forum for psychological issues better addressed in the privacy of a therapist’s office.

But unlike most of her over-identifying peers, Nancy Grace had a cable TV platform. No journalist did more to make Casey Anthony the poster girl for bad mothers everywhere, and even when what began as her own personal crusade grew into an international phenomenon, Grace remained at the center of the feeding frenzy, hurling bloody chunks of revelation and conjecture to an ever-growing audience of voyeurs, amateur sleuths, and deranged conspiracy theorists.

The law of attraction

You do not escape a legal abyss as deep as the one Casey Anthony had dug for herself without skilled legal representation, and in the United States such representation is available to only two kinds of criminal defendants — those who can afford to hire the full-time services of a good lawyer themselves, and those whose cases are so celebrated that good lawyers are willing to work on them for little or no fee, in the confidence that their labors will ultimately be compensated in some other way.

Casey Anthony is not Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former International Monetary Fund executive whose wealthy spouse bankrolled a money-is-no-object legal defense when Strauss-Kahn was accused of sexually assaulting a hotel chambermaid. And she is not O.J. Simpson or Michael Jackson, whose celebrity would have attracted top-flight legal counsel even if either man had lacked the financial resources to pay.

Until Grace and her fellow-travelers made her the uber-villainess, Casey Anthony was just another indigent defendant, the kind whose cases are plea-bargained every day by public defenders or court-appointed attorneys juggling dozens of clients just like her.

No place in the jury room

There were plenty of holes in the murder case against Anthony. But to find and exploit them required the skills of experienced trial lawyers with sufficient time and resources to take on a well-financed government prosecution. And until Grace & Co. vaulted her from local obscurity to internationally reviled Tot Mom, Casey Anthony’s chances of assembling such a team were negligible.

And so it matters not a whit that Grace was convinced of Anthony’s guilt before her daughter’s body was discovered, or that she spent years campaigning relentlessly for Tot Mom’s conviction; no one who enlisted in Grace’s crusade was ever going to get anywhere near the jury room in Orlando, where the only people whose opinion mattered would ultimately dictate Casey Anthony’s fate.

As a practical matter, Grace’s only function was to conjure a media event sufficiently hot and bright to attract a competent legal team. The lawyers did the rest, coolly drawing attention to all the gaps in the prosecution’s narrative.

I hope to be represented as capably should I ever find myself in such serious legal jeopardy. And if Nancy Grace wants to help my case by obsessing about it in prime time, I hope she pulls down huge ratings.

[Source : freep.com]