Justice delayed is justice bungled

Josh Vorhees has an article in The Slate about Casey Anthony:

A Florida jury has found Casey Anthony not guilty of murder in connection with the 2008 death of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee. The jury also declined to convict the 25-year-old of aggravated child abuse or aggravated manslaughter.
Jurors did, however, return a guilty verdict on the lowest of the four charges she faced: providing false information to police. Anthony faces up to four years in prison.
The Associated Press details the scene inside the courtroom:

After the verdict was read, Casey Anthony hugged her attorney Jose Baez and later mouthed the words "thank you" to him. Prosecutor Jeff Ashton, meanwhile, shook his head in disbelief.

The surprising verdict appears to bring an end to a case that captivated cable news viewers from the moment that the toddler was reported missing three years ago. Caylee's body was found in the woods six month later, but medical examiners were never able to determine how she died. The cause of death listed by authorities was a "homicide of undetermined means".
Anthony's defense lawyers had maintained that the girl drowned accidentally in the family swimming pool and that instead of reporting her death, Anthony "went into a dark corner to pretend as if nothing was wrong." Prosecutors, meanwhile, argued that Caylee was drugged with chloroform and then suffocated with duct tape by a hard-partying mother who crafted complex lies to hide her crime.
Baez conceded during the trial that his client had told elaborate lies, even inventing a fake father for her daughter, but said that didn't mean she was a murderer. The defense argued that Anthony was so adept at lying because she had been"trained to lie" as a result of years of sexual abuse at the hands of her father.
"They throw enough against the wall and see what sticks," Baez said of the prosecution's case during the trial's closing arguments. "That is what they're doing, right down to the cause of death."
Had Anthony been found guilty of first-degree murder, she could have faced the death penalty. In the end, however, she was convicted of only four counts of lying to investigators. She will be sentenced by the judge, and could receive up to a year in jail for each count of lying.

Rico says that Caylee, the poor kid, didn't have a fake father, though one didn't hear about her real father much; but four years for murdering your child is pretty good, considering...