Here is New York

moment of truth

It’s been a crazy week in the American justice system.

First, the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn (aka DSK) — the randy French politician — falls apart because the credibility of his accuser — a hotel maid — gets trashed. Coming on the heels of that, 12 jurors agree unanimously and, in record time,  that Casey Anthony had nothing to do with her daughter’s death.

The immediate response is to criticize our justice system as being faulty and in need of reform but I think, if anything, it shows that our justice system really is grounded in the concept of “innocent until proven guilty.”

All the pundits in the world can say and think and believe that DSK and Casey Anthony are guilty as sin but, in our courts, you still have to prove it. In Casey’s case, the jurors told the prosecutors they did NOT prove it and who are we to say they’re wrong? No one was able to say how Caylee died, and there was no direct proof that Casey killed her.

The prosecutors had a theory that Casey suffocated her two-year-old daughter to death with duct tape but there was zero proof of that. (And, as much as people compare this to the OJ case, there was a lot more evidence against OJ than there was against Casey.)

We may hate the outcome of the Anthony case and feel the same way about the likely collapse of the DSK case but think about it — do we really pay more than just lip service to the bedrock concept of our justice system that everyone is presumed innocence unless proven guilty?

We say we’d rather 100 guilty men go free than one innocent man be found guilty of something he did not do. Do we really believe that…or do we only believe that when it’s convenient?