O.J. Prosecutor Speaks Out on Anthony Acquittal

It seemed like everyone with an Internet connection (or TV show) rushed Wednesday to register his or her shock over Casey Anthony’s acquittal on charges of killing her two-year-old daughter.

Reactions ranged from the downright predictable: HLN host Nancy Grace saying that the “devil is dancing” at the verdict.

To the truly bizarre: the Twitter meme asking for a TV serial killer to seek vigilante justice.

But one take that might actually be worth reading comes from Marcia Clark, the Los Angeles prosecutor in the O.J. Simpson murder case. 

Clark said that Anthony’s acquittal was “more shocking” than Simpson’s because the 25-year-old mother wasn’t a celebrity and the mood in Florida in 2011 is much different than it was in Southern California in the mid-1990s.

“She never wowed the nation with her athletic prowess, shilled in countless car commercials, or entertained in film comedies,” Clark writes in the Daily Beast. “There were no racial issues, no violent Rodney King citywide riot just two years earlier.”

(We're going to go out on a limb and assume that Clark won't be too upset if the Anthony verdict knocks the Simpson one from the top spot on most people's list of Most Shocking Courtroom Upsets. Still, we somehow find her thoughts more valuable than Kim Kardashian’s.)

In the lengthy op-ed, Clark provides her take on everything from the defense’s decision to suggest, but not prove, that Anthony had been sexually assaulted by her father and brother to the media coverage surrounding the made-for-cable-news proceedings.

Ultimately, she concludes:

[A]lthough I must accept their verdict, I don’t have to agree with it. Because I did follow this case, and I have to be honest: If I’d been in that jury room, the vote would’ve been 11 to 1. Forever.

You can read the entire op-ed here.