Opinion

The jury has spoken

It was the most eagerly awaited verdict in a US criminal trial since the OJ Simpson case — and, to many people, the outcome was just as stunning.

After a nationally televised and much-debated trial, Casey Anthony was acquitted of the most serious charges — murder, manslaughter and child abuse — in the death of her 2-year-old daughter, Caylee.

She was convicted of four misdemeanor counts of lying to police — but could well be sentenced to time already served.

She might be free by tomorrow.

It’s a time-worn cliché that the US jury system is imperfect. But that makes it no less true.

And, by and large, that system does work.

A jury of 12 people who, by all accounts, listened attentively to all the evidence found reasonable doubt in prosecutors’ charge that Casey Anthony murdered her daughter because being a mother interfered with her party life.

That doesn’t mean they necessarily believed the defense’s claim that Caylee drowned in a swimming-pool accident and that Casey’s father, a former cop, tried to cover it up by making it look like a murder.

But it means they had sufficient doubts that the government had fully proved its case — and, under the law, that’s sufficient.

Many, of course, will be infuriated by the likelihood that no one will ever pay a criminal penalty for Caylee Anthony’s death.

But as the great Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. once said, we have “courts of law, not courts of justice.”