I think I actually might have killed some brain cells with the research for my paper. The professor assigned us all a case that we were supposed to research the criminal justice aspects of and if the party was acquitted we were supposed to research what they have been doing with their lives since the trial. And no, I was not given OJ Simpson although he does come up in mine. I got Casey Anthony who got charged with murdering her daughter Caylee. The entire thing was insane with what happened before she was brought to trial, but where I really got sucked down the rabbit hole was with what happened after her acquittal. For people who don’t know the story I’ll try and give a brief rundown of what went down - before they realized Caylee was dead her mom claimed that she was with the nanny so the police spent a lot of time tracking down the woman only to find out when they did that she wasn’t the nanny. In fact she’d never even met Casey Anthony or anybody else in the family so they start treating this like a kidnapping case with a stranger as the culprit.
Which is how an organization that runs searches for missing children gets involved with their resources and coordinating massive land, sea, and air searches and the FBI is involved too but they can’t find this little girl. Not until one of the searchers finds a shallow grave behind the Anthony home and when they dig it up they find Caylee’s body and from there we get to the trial and everything getting even nuttier and brain cell killing levels of weird to me. After Casey gets acquitted she kind of disappears from the public eye for a while. Well, until she somehow hooks up with OJ Simpson - which I could not find any info on how they met - and they start talking with one of the cable channels about a reality show starring the two of them talking about life after being acquitted for murder.
That hasn’t gone anywhere so now, according to Newsweek anyway, she’s working on a movie titled “As I Was Told” which she promises will have ‘both legal and erotic content’ which...okay then. There were civil suits filed against her one by the alleged nanny because of all the hell this entire thing made of her life. And the other by the organization in an attempt to recoup some of the money spent on the search when she knew her daughter wasn’t missing.
I’m pretty sure I put a lot more information into my paper than the professor was looking for but he didn’t give us a maximum page number for the assignment. And I just couldn’t see leaving any of it out.