As everyone knows, Casey Anthony was found not guilty last week of murder in the death of her daughter Caylee. She was found guilty of lying to investigators, but with credit for time served, she was released from jail on Saturday. The verdict seems to have aroused feelings of intense anger among many Americans, who are angered at seeing someone who likely killed her own daughter walk free. I won’t discuss the specifics of other people’s thoughts on Casey Anthony; they’re pretty easy to find at any news site. This post is more to discuss my own.  There are two points I want to make.

First point:  A lot of people have directed their anger towards the members of the jury.  Honestly, I don’t get that at all.  How could someone who is angry with the verdict think that they, who have probably just read a few articles or seen a few TV programmes about it, know more than someone who had spent weeks doing nothing but hearing every last detail of the case?  Also, our justice system is much more biased in favour of letting guilty people walk free than innocent people getting convicted.  There is a high bar with regards to being certain that the accused is in fact guilty.  We consider this to be a good thing.  No-one would ever want to be in the situation of having to go to jail for a crime they didn’t commit, and even though that happens sometime, it doesn’t happen a lot because proving that someone is guilty “beyond a shadow of a doubt” requires a lot of evidence, which usually isn’t there if the accused is in fact innocent.

Second point:  A few weeks ago I posted a two-part book review of the book In Defense of Flogging by Peter Moskos. In the first part, I discussed the many different purposes that incarceration can serve (although it often doesn’t serve those purposes too well).  Those purposes are deterrence, incapacitation, rehabilitation, restitution, and punishment.  In the second part, I argue that, while the first four purposes are still valuable, punishment has no good purpose.  While we cling to the idea of punishment because of how our brains are wired, if we want to advance as a species, we should discard the idea of punishing criminals and focus on the other four purposes listed above.  That doesn’t mean that we should abandon imprisonment or other negative consequences of crime.  For example, the threat of long prison sentences can be useful as a deterrent, and a criminal who poses a great danger to society should be locked up to keep him/her off the streets.  However, we shouldn’t mete out long prison sentences solely for the purpose of punishing people.

How does this apply to the current case?  Well, even if Casey Anthony were guilty of murder, how would a long prison sentence help matters?  It seems unlikely to act as a deterrent; people who kill their own children likely aren’t in a rational frame of mind, and couldn’t possibly weigh the consequences of their actions well.  She isn’t a threat to anyone else, so she doesn’t need to be locked up to protect the public.  If rehabilitation and restitution were important issues to consider, prison would be a poor place to address those anyway.  So, even if she were guilty, I don’t think that locking her up would be beneficial.  So, to those who assert that she should have been locked up forever, I would ask, why?  What is the benefit?  As shown above, there really isn’t any benefit.