Decorum

 

 

Jodi Arias at the moment she heard the verdict

Jodi Arias is now officially a murderer.  She is the 32-year-old woman who savagely cut her boyfriend’s throat from ear to ear, nearly decapitating him.  As if that wasn’t enough, Jodi stabbed him 26 more times, some in his back and one right in the heart.  But before she did all that, she shot him in the face. 

After watching the Phoenix-based trial over the past several months during which the defendant testified on her own behalf for eighteen long days, it is easy to understand that as far as the court of public opinion is concerned, she should be flung into a dumpster full of rats, never to escape until the vile rodents devoured her sorry carcass.

Jodi Arias is a study in narcissistic personality disorder.  She lied so many times between the murder and the verdict, including on the witness stand during her trial, I wouldn’t have believed her if she told me her name.  She is smug and arrogant when talking to a television reporter, telling him that “no jury is going to convict me.” She was sarcastic and belligerent when cross-examined by Prosecutor Juan Martinez.

Jodi claimed to be highly intelligent with an IQ on a level with Albert Einstein.  Yeah, right.  Her IQ was revealed in the court proceedings: 119.  Einstein’s is estimated to have been 160. 

In other words, Jodi Arias is easy to hate, in spite of her alleged sex appeal. 

When the verdict was read in the courtroom there was only one anguished cry from one of victim Travis Alexander’s sisters.  Aside from that, there was a funereal silence.  Of course, we’ll never know how that gallery of onlookers might have behaved had the judge not forbidden any type of outbursts.

Outside the courtroom was an entirely different story.  Even before the verdict was read there were two women interviewed on camera sobbing uncontrollably, praying for justice for Travis Alexander.  They didn’t know Travis from Adam’s housecat, but they were almost inconsolable.  When word of the verdict reached the growing gathering of trial watchers, they erupted in cheers.  Cheers! 

I believed it was wrong to celebrate when our soldiers killed Osama bin Laden and I believe it is wrong in this case.  What on earth is there to cheer about?  Travis’s name was dragged through the mud by the defendant and her lawyers.  And he is still just as dead as he was on that fateful day in 2008, so the Alexanders certainly aren’t cheering. 

There is another family grieving a loss today as well.  Jodi’s mother and aunt, identical twins, sat in that courtroom each and every day as the prosecution ripped her and her lies apart.  Imagine how that must have felt.  They didn’t do anything wrong, at least nothing they were on trial for.  They listened to Jodi’s tawdry recordings of her phone sex with Travis.  They looked at pictures of Jodi posing nude, and lewdly.  They saw the disturbing pictures of Travis lying in a bloody heap on his shower floor.

We Americans have a very tacky side to us.  With all the electronic tools we have to play with, the media feeds the savage beast that is our morbid curiosity and whips us all into a frenzy – some might say a feeding frenzy – until a tragic, disgusting, reprehensible criminal proceeding morphs into a modern-day Super Circus.  Loud mouthed cable prattlers play to every one of our human frailties, all in the name of “complete coverage” where “you won’t miss a moment of this.”

A bright and popular young man is dead.  An intelligent, articulate and mentally compromised young woman faces the possibility of her own execution or at the very least an entire life locked up.  Two families who were living their lives and minding their own business are now devastated and burdened with this sick tragedy forever.

This wasn’t a kangaroo court with a mock jury.  This wasn’t a medieval jousting match.  This was no scripted reality show that makes stars out of whack jobs.  This was the real deal; true life…and true death.  Shame on those who cheered.