Will Grigg?s Liberty Minute

July 8, 2011

An appetite for vicarious revenge is a leading symptom of a society?s terminal descent into collectivist savagery. That appetite has been displayed by public outrage over the acquittal of Casey Anthony, who had been accused of murdering her beautiful two-year-old daughter Caylee.

As has become the custom, Casey Anthony?s trial became a ?reality TV? program. Nancy Grace, a former prosecutor turned cable news personality, skillfully manipulated public sentiment to exploit the trial for ratings. Grace is a real-life incarnation of the Dickens character Madame DeFarge, who knitted at the foot of the guillotine during the French Revolution?s reign of terror.

When Miss Anthony was acquitted, Grace took to the airwaves to assail the verdict and the jury ? rather than assailing the prosecution for failing to make its case, as Anglo-Saxon legal principles require. One syndicated conservative columnist insistedthat the Casey Anthony verdict underscores the supposed need to abolish the jury system.

America has become a country in which we permit the government to wage undeclared wars, assassinate official enemies on the president?s whim, and ignore the Constitution. Why wouldn?t a nation so inured to official lawlessness discard the jury system, as well?

Let us take back the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.