14 DAY TRIAL // Casey Anthony, the woman accused of killing her 2-year-old daughter, dumping her body in the swamp and lying to everybody about what happened to her, will walk free in just a few days’ time. The first juror to rule she was “not guilty,” Jennifer Ford, is speaking out on the controversial verdict.
The media and public alike were shocked to hear that Anthony was found guilty only on four counts of lying and deliberately deceiving to a police officer, and that she would not be held accountable for the death of her daughter.
Several pieces of evidence seemed to point that she had killed Caylee, transported her body to the swamp and dumped it there, where it was found rotten months later.
That wasn’t enough to determine that she had really committed murder, Ford told ABC in a brand new interview, part of which can also be seen in the video embedded below.
Since prosecutors were asking for the death penalty, the jurors were under a lot of pressure to make sure their decision (whatever it was) was based on actual facts and not on suppositions – and it is here that prosecutors failed, in that they couldn’t present facts.
“I did not say she was innocent. I just said there was not enough evidence. If you cannot prove what the crime was, you cannot determine what the punishment should be,” Ford tells ABC.
“If you’re going to charge someone with murder, don’t you have to know how they killed someone or why they might have killed someone, or have something where, when, why, how? Those are important questions. They were not answered,” she underlines.
Had she ruled that Anthony was guilty of murder when she wasn’t, she would have committed a crime for sending an innocent woman to death, Ford underlines.
Still, she stresses that “not guilty doesn’t mean innocent,” it just means that, in this particular case, prosecutors could not make a strong case against Anthony.
“I toggled on manslaughter and not guilty. It doesn’t feel good. It was a horrible decision to have to make,” Ford says.
As we also noted yesterday, because of the media attention the Anthony trial has been getting, she’s believed to be on the verge of launching a career in showbiz – interviews and perhaps even a reality show will probably be next on the list for her, once she gets out of jail.
