There you go. Some people persist in thinking that the problem here wasn't the jury. It's just that the prosecution didn't do a good job. Nope. They were idiots.
They weren't being asked to determine the punishment. That would only have happened if they had voted guilty on the 1st degree murder charge, and that would have been a separate proceeding.
Can't prove what the crime was? Let's see. The child's body is found in bag, dumped in a field, with duct tape wrapped around the head. Call me naive, but I think the crime we're looking at here is pretty obvious. But I guess I don't have an idiot's perspective.
I just wanted to repost it. :-)
How do you know it was 1st degree murder? Could it have been 2nd degree? Could it have been simple manslaughter?
The child's body is found in bag, dumped in a field, with duct tape wrapped around the head. Call me naive, but I think the crime we're looking at here is pretty obvious.
The crime there would be abuse of a corpse. Was she even charged with that crime?
The problem to me was bad police work and prosecutors going for 1st degree (a capital crime in Florida) instead of going for manslaughter and abuse of a corpse. They probably could have gotten convictions on those.