The Casey Anthony Verdict

This post was written by Senior Pastor Dave Gadoury

“She’s getting away with murder!”

“This is shocking! Everybody knows she did it.”

“What has happened to us? Solving crimes is not like CSI.”

And so go the surprised reactions to the Casey Anthony acquittal this week. All but a minority of
legal experts had predicted that this three-year ordeal would end with some kind of conviction.
Now there is feverish speculation about how many millions Casey Anthony will make from her
new celebrity, and about the troubled fortunes of the Anthony family.

If you are persuaded that the prosecution’s case was convincing, you may be suffering from
some doubts about whether our system of justice is broken. It occurred to me that we may be
seeing yet another consequence of the drift of a post-modern culture: jury paralysis.

In a world that glorifies tolerance, that is loath to make judgments of anyone, and that regards all
truth as relative, it is easy to see that juries will find it increasingly difficult to render their verdicts.
After all, a jury is called upon to represent a society’s INtolerance for certain behaviors, to make
judgments of enormous consequence, and to definitively reject someone’s case as false. Can we
expect this to be an easy task for a group of folks who are carefully selected with the hope that they
will represent the society’s outlook and values (or new found lack of them)?

Compounding this dilemma is the practical reality that sending someone to jail may not leave you
with a very good feeling. Yet in our new post-modern world feelings are everything. How a juror
may feel about a defendant, or the outcome of a verdict, is likely to have much more weight than
any appeal to logic or all but the most undeniable facts. Prosecutors have their work cut out for
them. The quest for justice may be more illusive than ever. Which brings me to my main point.

“Where was the God of justice in all this?” asked the radio talk personality. In the brief minutes of
listening that my schedule allowed, there followed a rambling discourse about God, His supposed
justice, and the perception that He had somehow failed to deliver it this week. If this thought has
troubled you, as well, let me set the record straight.

God is just, and every act of evil has a just consequence, but only on His timetable. In this life we
will continue to see what the sage himself observed long ago: “And I saw something else under
the sun: In the place of judgment—wickedness was there, in the place of justice—wickedness
was there.” This is a troubling realization, but it is tempered when balanced by the rest of the
story: “I said to myself, ‘God will bring into judgment both the righteous and the wicked, for there
will be a time for every activity, a time to judge every deed.’” (Ecclesiastes 3:16-18)

Fallen human beings can only hope to approximate the perfect justice of God. Evils unpunished
in this life will not escape His searching review in the life to come. Those who are frustrated
by the divine failure to deliver retribution must keep in mind that their own failings (and we all
are guilty) must also be accounted for. Judgment day is coming, and the only way of escape is
through the gracious work of Jesus, who carried the burden of guilt to the cross for us.

For the best perspective on all this, consider the words of Jesus: “For God did not send his Son
into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him
is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because they have
not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the
world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.”(John 3:17-19)