Re: Jury is inwh
'Why I Won’t Follow The Casey Anthony Trial'
I admit I know virtually nothing* about the trial of Casey Anthony, who is accused of killing her almost three-year-old toddler, Caylee. I find the media and the public’s obsessive preoccupation with this murder trial to be morbid, just as it was with the 1996 Jon Benet Ramsey murder case.
But, most of all, I just find it—put it politely— selective. Virtually every month in New York City a young child is murdered either by his or her mother or the mother’s boyfriend or the adult responsible for the child—and hardly any of them ever gets the kind of national round-the-clock media coverage that Caylee Anthony’s death is receiving.
In September of last year, four-year-old Marchella Brett-Pierce was found beaten and starved to death in her Brooklyn home. She’d been tied to her bed and weighed only 18 pounds. Her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, her grandmother, and even two child welfare workers who had falsified visitation documents were all arrested. Katie Couric did a small piece on it for CBS News, but there was no national outcry along the lines of what Caylee Anthony is getting.
In March, 18-month-old Louis Dewayne Mosely was beaten to death while in foster care in Brooklyn. I bet you’re asking, who? No People magazine cover for Louis like there was for Caylee. In June, 5-year-old Jamar Johnson was beaten to death by his mother for breaking the television set. She actually watched him writhe in agonizing pain for five days before he died. There will be no long lines to get into the trial of Jamar Johnson’s mother, if there ever is one, like the lines that form for the Casey Anthony trial. The New York Times even wrote on Sunday about how the trial has become a tourist destination, with people from all over the country traveling to see it.
Have I mentioned that Marchella, Louis and Jamar were all black?
I’m not saying that Caylee Anthony’s death is less horrible because so many other children are killed by the adults in their short, brutal lives. But I am saying that all children who are murdered deserve attention, not just certain children.
UPDATE: This post drew the attention of Carole Moore, former police detective and author of The Last Place You’d Look: True Stories of Missing Persons and the People Who Search for Them. Moore says that the media and public’s tendency to focus only on cases that involve certain types of children—white, cute, female, and usually of a middle to upper-class demographic—is problematic because media coverage is what often leads to a break in a murder or missing person’s case.
“It’s heartbreaking that what sells to a cable channel is often a pretty college student and rarely the black housewife with no reason to go missing when she runs to the grocery store for milk,” says Moore. She says that this disparity in interest and coverage has a quasi-official name, “Pretty White Woman Syndrome.” In the case of Caylee Anthony, it would be pretty white little girl syndrome.
Moore points out that missing or murdered males often go unnoticed too. “When was the last time you saw a huge uproar on national television about a missing 19-year-old male college student?” she asks. “Yet disappearances like that happen all the time.”
In cases like this, it is often up to the parent to keep their child’s name alive through websites and word of mouth. Please check out Project Jason, named after 19-year-old college student Jason Jolkowski, who disappeared ten years ago. The site seeks to increase the awareness of missing persons—those who won’t grab the national spotlight the way Caylee Anthony has.