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Nope.

Don't buy it for a minute.

Not even close.

Having also served on juries, I can tell you from my own experience that this is simply a case of twelve extremely stupid people who believed that "beyond a reasonable doubt" meant "to a certainty." They aren't the same thing. A reasonable doubt is no more and no less than that: the reasoned doubt of a reasonable person. These jurors are clearly not reasonable human beings.

Jurors are not automatons; they are allowed (and expected) to bring judicial discretion, common sense, and common knowledge to a jury room. This jury brought none of these things.

People are convicted of murder every day on less evidence than this, sometimes without even a body. A number of jurors or alternates have now made the statement that the prosecution never said what she died of. Again, this betrays an incredible ignorance and gullibility. Simply because the defense said in summation that no actual cause of death was ever established, that doesn't make it part of the the prosecution's burden of proof. As a matter of fact, the prosecution did not, and in general does not need to establish the actual cause of death as long as there is a reasonable inference of homicide. There was such an inference. A little girl was not simply alive one day, and suddenly dead without intervening cause on another. She was alive, last seen in the company of a mother who had a clear motive to murder her, and who lied with specificity when questioned concerning her disappearance. Her lies were not harmless but in fact impinged directly on the question of her guilt and the ability of investigators to produce the evidence needed to solve the crime. To sensible people, exercising common sense, this is not the way an innocent person behaves; especially in the disappearance of her child.

In order to believe the defense's theory of the crime, one must accept actions which defy all common sense: When someone murders another human being, they may try to make it look like an accident, but NO ONE takes an accidental death and tries to make it look like a murder. Yet that is what an absolutely incompetent defense expected us the believe, and what twelve abysmally dimwitted jurors accepted as possible.

These are twelve complete morons. No one should make excuses for them. They deserve the complete disapprobation of their countrymen, and all sensible human beings.