Strangeness is a quality of subatomic particles. It’s also a quality that I seem to suffer from whenever I watch TruTV’s broadcast of the Casey Anthony trial and hear their commentators’ take on the testimony and evidence.

Is Casey Believable?

This morning a former police officer-turned-TV-commentator questioned whether the jury would believe Casey Anthony’s claim that her daughter drowned in the backyard swimming pool on June 16, 2008, if they believed she was suffering from a severe mental disorder, such as either sociopathy or Post-Traumatic-Stress Disorder (PTSD).

He doesn’t seem to understand that the jury isn’t required to believe Casey Anthony’s claims—all they are required to do is decide whether the prosecution proved its claims beyond a reasonable doubt. Maybe he doesn’t believe that jurors are capable of making this distinction, because he can’t.

Well, I can tell him from personal experience as a juror on a criminal case that jurors can do that. Even when confronted with a defendant who is clearly not a model citizen, who clearly has committed some crime or crimes, whom his attorney has even thrown under the bus, jurors can still say that the prosecution did not prove its case.

In fact, of course, Casey hasn’t made any claims yet. Her attorney’s opening statement isn’t evidence.

Casey Didn’t Sleep at Home

Another strangeness about me is that I seem to have noticed a contradiction which commentators have not between George Anthony’s testimony that he was in the habit of spending time with Caylee every day before he went to work and the testimony of at least a dozen witnesses that Caylee spent the night with them and her mother during the month of May and the first two weeks of June 2008. This contradiction seems so blatant to me that I’m beginning to wonder about my own sanity. Did I really hear this?

I didn’t keep track of the dates or the number of nights Casey and Caylee spent with five or six different boyfriends and girlfriends, but I have the distinct impression that Casey didn’t want to spend the night at home for some reason.

But she did spend the night of June 15 at home. And that was the last time Caylee was seen alive.