Hey Amer­ica! Have I got a news flash for you: in this coun­try, we don’t con­vict peo­ple of any crime, no mat­ter how heinous, unless they are proven guilty beyond a rea­son­able doubt. It’s kinda like one of the guid­ing prin­ci­ples of our legal sys­tem. And by ‘kinda like’ I mean it really, really is and we were all taught this in our mid­dle school civics’ class—is your mem­ory / school atten­dance that poor?

How brave you Twit­tiots are! What courage you demon­strate in your Tweets and Face­book sta­tus updates com­pared to those cow­ardly jurors who bore the bur­den of judg­ing this woman, of lis­ten­ing to every argu­ment and every piece of evi­dence made avail­able to them and still were not will­ing to con­vict a woman of mur­der when the evi­dence didn’t prove her con­clu­sively guilty. You bore none of the bur­den, yet express all of the outrage!

This is a prime exam­ple of our idi­otic obses­sion with things that don’t really mat­ter; it takes a whole lot of priv­i­lege to be this friv­o­lous.  After all, if we pre­tend to care about some­thing that we have absolutely zero con­trol over, then we don’t feel so bad for ignor­ing the myr­iad injus­tices that we do have con­trol over—that we could change, if we weren’t such suck­ers for the cir­cus. If you need a few solid exam­ples, I’d say 99% of the stuff on this blog would suffice.

Thank you to those who appre­ci­ate the true mean­ing of jus­tice. That it is “bet­ter that ten guilty per­sons escape than that one inno­cent suf­fer.” You keep us safe from the mob.

Here are a few sto­ries that are vastly more impor­tant than the Casey Anthony trial:

• Trust Law com­pares women’s rights in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa.
• Con­gress­woman Louise Slaugh­ter and U.S. Sen­a­tor Kirsten Gilli­brand intro­duce leg­is­la­tion that would grant women in the mil­i­tary the same repro­duc­tive rights as civilians.
• Sen­a­tor Gilli­brand (I sense a pat­tern…) forms the “Off the Side­lines” cam­paign to increase the par­tic­i­pa­tion of women in politics.
• Katha Pol­litt talks Slut­Walks for The Nation.