Presumed Guilty

by Jose Baez

  “Why don’t you sign me up as an investigator?” he asked.

  I didn’t trust him enough to do that.

  “No, no, none of that,” I said. “I don’t want to be affiliated with you in any shape or form.”

  I had him sign a confidentiality agreement.

  Padilla said the only condition he would put on the deal would be to have a woman on his own security team in the Anthony house in case Casey tried to run.

  “No problem,” I said.

  I made him sign a written agreement to these rules, some which he would later ignore. I told him, “You can’t talk to her and you can’t question her.” He agreed. Padilla put up the money and the collateral, and Casey got her release.

  CHAPTER 4

  ROOKIE LAWYER

  PUTTING UP WITH THE CRAZINESS of the media was almost as difficult as trying to keep up with the shenanigans of the prosecution and the police. It wasn’t long before the media trucks were lined up in such numbers outside my office on Simpson Road in Kissimmee that they were taking up every space in my ten-car parking lot. My other clients were reluctant to come to my office because the media outlets were filming everyone walking in my door and putting them on the news.

  Finally I put my foot down. Enough was enough. I gave them all trespass warnings and told them if they didn’t park across the street in the school lot, I was going to call the police. They were incensed about that, but they complied.

  By law they could park across the street, and while that was still too close, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I’d pull up in my car to go to my office, and they’d film that. And at night, when I left, they filmed that too. They would shout, “Here he comes!” and the cameras would start to roll.

  There must have been ten different news outlets, and each of them would call my office incessantly. Finally I said, “I’ll work with you, but stop calling. I’ll make a brief statement, give you what you need, and you can go away or at least stop bothering me.”

  I’d walk across the street, and they’d film me crossing the street. I would be standing there, waiting for cars to pass, looking both ways, and then I’d jog across the street, and they’d film it and put it on TV. Why couldn’t they just wait for me to get there? I could only conclude that they wanted me to look bad.

  I told myself, You have to stop this too. It was all a learning experience for me. I’d get in my car, and they’d film me backing out with my license plate number in sight, and I’d have to stop and say, “Listen, I will talk to you, but please don’t film me driving away in my car. I’d like a little privacy.”

  They’d say, “No problem,” but the next time I was backing out, again they’d start filming. I soon realized that the word of the media people meant absolutely nothing.

  I would give them a statement, and they would take what I said and spin it around and make it into whatever it was they wanted to say. The perfect example of this came much later in the case when the state decided to make this a death penalty case. When I was asked whether Casey was informed, I told them, “Casey knows the forces that she’s up against.” The lead story that night began, “Jose Baez says there are forces against Casey,” implying supernatural forces. I would just shake my head. It was the theater of the absurd. It took me awhile to understand that I wasn’t just a lawyer. I was an important cast member of their reality show. And then they started digging into my background. And that really started to bother me.

  I hadn’t said a word about my past, but they soon found that I had graduated from St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami in 1997 but wasn’t admitted to the bar until 2005. They insinuated that, because I had failed the bar for eight years, I must be stupid because it took me so long to pass it. Their story became, Here is this stupid Hispanic kid who’s only been a lawyer for three years and couldn’t pass the bar for eight years. And his office is in a strip mall.

  The other sobriquet they would throw at me was “Kissimmee lawyer.” As in Jose Baez, Kissimmee lawyer, an insult they’d toss off in a condescending way to show that because my office wasn’t in sophisticated Orlando but rather in hayseed Kissimmee I was some kind of country, hillbilly lawyer.

  Another way the media described me was to call me a “rookie lawyer” as in Casey Anthony’s rookie lawyer. Because I had only been a member of the bar for three years, many of the so-called “legal experts” were saying, “He’s over his head. He doesn’t have the experience. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.” Before long everything I did was second-guessed.

  “That was a stupid motion.”

  “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

  Early on, one of my tactics with the state and law enforcement was to demand information. I’d file ten motions at a time rather than make one motion to ask for ten different things. I did this on purpose in an attempt to get them riled up. They would drag their feet, and I wanted the judge to make them send things to me more quickly.

  When I started doing that, I heard the public criticism immediately, that I either didn’t know what I was doing or that I had somehow botched a motion. One time the media accused me of forgetting the court’s jurisdiction. I thought, Whaaaaat? What are they talking about? They would accuse me of not knowing what I was talking about.

  The public may have been convinced that I was an idiot, but I let it all roll off my back. When I had worked in the public defender’s office in Miami, my boss was Rick DeMaria.

  “Experience is always good, but it is secondary to being skilled and prepared,” he would say. “One can be a bad lawyer for a long, long time.”

  I won a lot of cases working in the public defender’s office because I had good trial skills, and no one outworked me. If you’re prepared by working hard, it trumps experience every time.

  One time when I was leaving the jail, I gave Casey a hug. A female guard came over and barked at me, “Get away from her. You can’t touch an inmate.”

  “What?”

  It was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard. I’ve hugged innumerable male inmates, and no one said a word. This had nothing to do with jail policy, I knew. Rather it was their simmering prejudice against Casey.

  It really angered me when she said that.

  “What are you implying here?” I asked.

  “We’re not implying anything,” she said. “You just can’t have physical contact with an inmate.”

  I said, “You know, she’s a human being, and if I want to shake her hand, or hug her, I will.”

  “Then we’ll put her behind the glass partition, and that way you won’t have any physical contact with her.”

  “I’ll file a motion in court,” I said, “and we’ll see about that.” Then I thought to myself, Let it go. Assholes will be assholes. It’s not that important.

  But someone from corrections leaked the incident to the media, and the story was exaggerated to say that Casey and I were hugging and that we had to be separated from our embrace. Later a jail spokesperson came out and said the report wasn’t true, but that was never picked up by the media. Making things worse, other media outlets picked up the original report and made up their own version of “the day Jose Baez hugged Casey Anthony.”

  I should have known what was coming next. Geraldo Rivera had warned me, but I didn’t believe him.

  I found Geraldo to be a really down-to-earth person. While I recognized he had a job to do, he also recognized the same about me, and we never tried to overstep our boundaries with each other professionally. It was the beginning of a true friendship.

  Geraldo had covered the O. J. Simpson case and had done battle with defense attorney Johnnie Cochran, who has always been one of my heroes. Geraldo would tell me some of the mistakes that Cochran made, warning me not to make the same mistakes.

  “Be careful what you do personally,” he said. There was an instance when Cochran confided in a former girlfriend, telling her that he was sure to win the case if he could get one black person on the jury. When the former
girlfriend told the media, it became headlines. There were also reports of him having had a mistress.

  “Be careful who you trust,” he warned me. “Watch yourself. Don’t fall into the same traps.”

  Geraldo was part of the media that made Cochran’s life difficult, and I asked him why, because the issues he had revealed had nothing to do with the case.

  “When you’re in these high-profile cases,” he said, “it’s a blood sport. And no one will have mercy on you.” I always remembered Geraldo’s words when dealing with the media, even though in the end I was plenty bloodied.

  About a month before the headlines aired about my hugging Casey, I was in New York hiring a DNA expert when Geraldo invited Lorena and me to go sailing on his boat. We were sitting together on the boat, and Geraldo said to me, “You know, you have a really beautiful wife.”

  “Yeah, I think so too,” I said.

  “What you should do is take her around town in Orlando and be seen with her publicly,” he said.

  “No,” I said, “I really want to keep my family out of this.” I had seen how vicious the media could be, and the last thing I wanted to do was expose my family to it.

  “No. Listen, and listen carefully,” Geraldo said. “If you don’t do that, before you know it, they’re going to accuse you of having an affair with Casey.”

  “What?” I said. “An affair with Casey? You’re nuts.” And I laughed him off.

  And sure enough, about a month later, the media aired the “news” about my hugging Casey in jail, and rumors started flying that I was having an affair with her.

  Geraldo, who’s been in the business for forty years, saw it coming from a mile away.

  When the “news” hit the airwaves, I felt helpless. First of all, I’m a legal professional, and I would never allow myself to be put in a position where I had a relationship like that with a client. Not only that, but I am married to a Hispanic woman, and if the accusation had been true, Lorena Baez would have turned into Lorena Bobbitt. It was a ridiculous charge, but there wasn’t anything I could do. I told my wife about the story, and she became a little angry, but it was short-lived. In the end she knew better.

  But it wasn’t fun having to tell her about the charges. Trying to prove that something isn’t true is not a fun situation at all. And then professors at the college Lorena was attending started asking her about it. In the middle of one class, a professor called her out and said, “Oh, I hear your husband’s having an affair with Casey Anthony.” It really bothered her and hurt her tremendously.

  People today still bring it up. I was never concerned, because I knew it wasn’t true. But having to deal with the bullshit of it all really infuriated me.

  It didn’t take me long to figure out that in this case I had to battle not only the media but also the prosecution, the cops, and the judge. There were times, as you will see, that the crush of the opposition almost became too much to bear.

  Fortunately, I wasn’t the rookie lawyer everyone said I was. My background, as unconventional as it was, had given me the tools to defend Casey in this case.

  Growing up in New York City and Miami, I was raised by my mother, who moved around quite a bit to find work. I have three much older sisters on my mother’s side from another marriage. I have four brothers on my father’s side from another marriage. I was the only child of my parents, who split when I was four years old.

  My sisters raised me while my mother worked two or three jobs. My mother worked in a nursery and in factories. She cleaned houses, taking whatever jobs she could get. Eventually my sisters went off on their own, and it was just my mother and me. I had no strong male figure in my life and, at age fifteen, I started to become rebellious. A couple times I moved out and went to live with one of my sisters. At the age of sixteen I dropped out of high school in the ninth grade. At age seventeen I met a girl and got her pregnant. She was sixteen.

  I was on the road to nowhere, but then I heard the heartbeat of my daughter Christina. She would save me and put me on the path that led me to where I am today. I know I would not be a lawyer today if it were not for the motivation of becoming a father. My sole mission in life was to one day have my daughter say to me, “Dad, I am proud of you.” That day came while I was representing Casey. Christina was getting her degree in public relations from the University of Florida when I asked her to come down and help me with all of the media requests that were coming in. It was the summer and she needed experience and what better experience could she have than a national high-profile case? One day she came over to me and said, “Dad, I am proud of you. You are standing by this girl when no one else will. I truly admire that.” That was it. I felt my life’s goal had been accomplished right then and there, and it made all that I was about to suffer worth it. It would also give me the strength to forge ahead.

  I didn’t want my child to be raised in a single-parent home, so I married her mother. I then joined the U.S. Navy at seventeen. My wife and daughter came with me, first to boot camp in San Diego, then to Meridian, Mississippi, for school, and then to Norfolk, Virginia, where I was stationed. While I was in the navy I got my GED and started college at Tidewater Community College. After I got out of the navy, I was able to take advantage of the GI Bill to go to Miami Dade Community College.

  We got divorced after six years of marriage, but I continued to stay in my Christina’s life. I transferred to Florida State University in Tallahassee and, after two years, I graduated and moved to Miami to go to law school.

  Originally I had wanted to enter federal law enforcement. My dream job was to serve in the United States Secret Service. I had studied criminology at Florida State and while I was there, I filled out my application and went through the hiring process. But at this point I was engaged to a woman who was going to law school, so I decided to see if I, too, could get in. I figured I could make a bigger difference as a lawyer than as a law enforcement officer.

  I was accepted into St. Thomas University School of Law. It was very difficult because I had to work full time in order to pay my child support. Mostly I worked as a security guard or in loss prevention in stores—and it was tough because, under American Bar Association guidelines, I wasn’t supposed to work more than twenty hours a week. I can admit it now—sometimes I went over because I needed so badly to make money.

  I lived in a boarding house in Miami. We had some very colorful characters renting rooms, including a single mother who worked as a prostitute, two mechanics who worked on their cars in the front yard, and another guy who I’m not quite sure what he did.

  I drove a jalopy. When I parked in the law school parking lot, smoke would come out the exhaust; I would be parked next to a Mercedes or a BMW.

  The first year of law school is difficult enough for a student with no other responsibilities, but I managed to make it through. That first summer I was going to do my internship at the state attorney’s office in Miami. I was excited, but that first day on the job I felt that something wasn’t quite right. I didn’t enjoy it. It was a dry, angry environment.

  The next day I walked across the street to the Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office and I never left. I loved it. I got to work with clients and got to be around people. The public defender’s office was about helping people, working with real people and real problems, being the light of hope for people who had no hope. I fell in love with it.

  I was around great lawyers and great people while I was there. I learned so much that I didn’t want to go to law school anymore. I just wanted to be there. The second and third years of law school aren’t nearly as hard as the first, and I was able to graduate, despite spending most of my time at the public defender’s office. I was a C student, but it didn’t matter to me because all I wanted was to be in the courtroom. That was my passion. It’s what thrilled me and kept me in law school. The other classes, like contracts and torts, didn’t do anything for me, but the advocacy of a jury trial really hooked me. The O. J. Simpson case aired during the middle o
f my second year; I watched it every day and was fascinated by the case. Johnnie Cochran, Barry Scheck, F. Lee Bailey, Dr. Henry Lee—these guys were like rock stars to me.

  The law school library had videodiscs, like records, from the Harvard Law School trial advocacy center. The discs contained video of students conducting trials. It was from those tapes that I learned about evidence objections. I was always impressed by Harvard, and I am proud to say that this past year I was invited to be a faculty member of the same program.

  By the time I graduated from law school, I had ten jury trials under my belt. I could practice under a certified legal internship as long as I had a licensed attorney by my side. I was able to pick a jury, make opening statements, cross-examine witnesses, and go through the entire trial. I learned so much and have to give credit to these fine lawyers who helped develop me as a criminal defense lawyer.

  I was so excited when the public defender’s office hired me. The office allowed me to start right away. Fresh out of law school, I was given one hundred and fifty cases, and that first year I tried twenty-four of them. I was in court every week. Most of the cases were minor issues like battery, domestic violence, resisting arrest, or cases where the defendants didn’t plead out.

  Out of the thirty-four cases I tried (including ten while in law school), I lost three, and two of those were reversed on appeal. I had a very high success rate. The Miami-Dade Public Defender’s Office has a stellar reputation for developing great lawyers, among them Roy Black, Michael Haggard, and Jack Denaro. All I ever wanted was to be the next great lawyer to come from that office.

  One of the most important traits I learned, one that I carry with me to this day, is the mentality of a fearless warrior. We were taught to fear no one—not the cops, not the judge, and certainly not the prosecutor. A couple of months after I graduated from law school, I had a heated cross-examination that involved Leonel Tapanes, a Miami police officer. The next day Tapanes confronted me in the courtroom, and we nearly came to blows. He thought—as most police officers do—that I would bow to his authority, and when I didn’t, he held it against me. There we stood, nose to nose, about to get into a fistfight in the courtroom.