She did it. You know she did.  I’m pretty sure he did it, too.  But I didn’t sit in a courtroom day after day listening to hundreds of hours of testimony and I wasn’t in the room with 11 of her peers (or his) to help deliberate.  We know in our guts, based on sound bites and sensationalized headlines  that she’s guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  But fortunately, we mostly live in a society where our “guts” don’t get to decide. You don’t have to go far back into our history to recall tales of angry lynch mobs stringing up someone because their “guts” told them it was the right thing to do. Think of all the overturned cases where someone’s “feelings” about a suspect landed the wrong person in jail. I want to believe that those witnesses and victims were just as sure that the person who was being sentenced had committed the crime they were accused of.   Here in the US, when our system works, we do not run kangaroo courts.  You are innocent until proven guilty. Guilty verdicts should never be foregone conclusions. “Guts” aren’t facts.  “Guts” aren’t evidence.

Tragically that system sometimes works in a way that the right person gets off.

Do I think she did it?  Absolutely.  I thought he did it, too.  I know I personally wouldn’t double bag and duct tape a child who had recently drown and discard them in the woods, but maybe that’s just me. Still, I have to place a certain amount of faith in our legal system and in the jurors who were selected.  I need to believe that they did the right thing based on the evidence they had, because I wasn’t there through each grueling day listening to all of that evidence.  They had the luxury of being sequestered away from the media, I did not.

So, if we could all put down the torches and the nooses for a bit and wait until we hear what the jurors have to say that would be great.  I’m very curious about why they ruled the way they did, just like you are.