Imperfect Justice

by Jeff Ashton

  JUROR 3: Jennifer Ford. I use her name because she has been interviewed publicly since the trial. A nursing student in her thirties, Jennifer appeared to be starting her career a little late, so I sensed that she had a change of career path at some point. Working and going to school is tough, so I thought she would judge Casey’s apparent laziness harshly. I don’t recall that she had kids, which was a minus in my mind. The way I remember it, Frank didn’t care for her, saying he didn’t like her attitude. I guess his instincts were good after all.

  JUROR 4: An African-American woman in her forties. One of the first things she volunteered was that she didn’t feel she could judge other people. Usually when someone brings something like that up, it’s a sure sign that they either really mean it or just don’t want to be there. Later she would modify that somewhat to claim that she thought she could serve in spite of that belief. We tried to strike her, but the defense objected, claiming we were striking her based on her race. I thought it was an obvious call, since by her own admission she was going to have trouble judging anyone and judgment is the sole purpose of the jury. My jaw dropped when Judge Perry wouldn’t let us excuse her. I thought that legally we were acting reasonably and within the law. I only hoped that the judge saw something in her I had missed, but her views on judgment made her seem like a sure vote for the defense.

  JUROR 5: The “roach coach lady.” Her job was working on one of those mobile lunch wagons, thus the nickname. An older woman with very little education. We would have struck her if we’d had anyone better. She had grown kids and had worked hard all her life. I hoped she would bring that life experience to bear when listening to Casey 4.0.

  JUROR 6: The baker. A married father, he clearly did not want to serve, but he didn’t have a good reason not to. His kids were young, as I recall, and I thought he would not buy into any excuse for a mother partying shortly after her daughter died. He was okay but still not the leader that we needed.

  JUROR 7: A white female in her early forties. I believe she worked in some occupation related to children or child welfare. I liked her, as she seemed fairly well-educated and levelheaded. She was the only juror I recall who showed much emotion throughout the trial, and at the end of it all, when the clerk read the verdict, she was the only one who shed a tear.

  JUROR 8: A white female in her fifties. She worked for AT&T in a job she’d had for many years. She also did not have too much formal education, but we hoped life experience would play a role.

  JUROR 9: A white male in his fifties. He had never married, but he spoke with great affection about some nieces and nephews. Originally from Indiana, where he’d managed a sawmill, he referred to himself as “semiretired.” Rather mild-mannered and not forceful, he was a very thin fellow, who actually looked rather frail. I knew he was not going to lead anyone and would probably follow the majority.

  JUROR 10: A white male in his forties who’d never married, lived alone, and also worked at the phone company. He was fairly tall, very friendly, but a definite follower. He was the guy who sits in the cubicle next to you for years and never makes waves. He’s always pleasant and easy to manage—every supervisor’s dream.

  JUROR 11: The one we referred to as “the coach.” He was a high school sports coach who was working in special education. He was from Pittsburgh—same hometown as Linda, so she liked him—and he seemed like a good-looking, stand-up guy. He hadn’t heard much about the case. I figured that as a high school teacher he probably had experience of being lied to. I also thought that as a high school teacher, especially as an attractive male, he must always have had in the back of his mind the possibility of a false allegation of a sexual nature by a female student. If they made the allegation against George, that might help us. Linda pushed hard for this guy. She thought he would be the leader we were looking for.

  JUROR 12: My favorite. The defense had exhausted all of their challenges. She was pro death penalty, which in itself was not that big a deal, but I thought it showed she was strong in her opinions. She was in her sixties. Retired but working at a local supermarket chain. I wasn’t sure that she had a lot of formal education, but I hoped she’d have a lot of common sense.

  When we got to the end, we had these twelve jurors as well as five alternates. We could have struck four more of the existing jurors and replaced them with alternates, but when it came to the five we had remaining, I just didn’t see that any of them was an upgrade over what we had. In fact, a few were much worse, and going to them would also have resulted in bringing in a new panel and extending our stay another few days.

  I wouldn’t say we were happy with the jury. They were very bland and not all that impressive. They were not the jury we’d wanted when we set out to do this, but they were the jury that would ultimately decide the fate of Casey Anthony.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SEARCHING FOR TRUTH

  The day before the trial began, Monday, May 22, 2011, I met with George Anthony for the final time. He came to my office with his attorney, Mark Lippman, looking as worn down as I’d ever seen him. I just wanted to meet with him to go over what I was going to ask him in testimony. As we spoke, he seemed to have come back to the place that he was the first time we met him. He seemed to be accepting his daughter’s involvement in all this. That day, right before the trial began, he actually said something that I hadn’t heard from him before—ever.

  “I know that Casey did something to Caylee,” he told me. “I just don’t know what.”

  Hearing him utter those words was actually heartbreaking because he seemed very torn between the real affection he still felt for his daughter and the greater affection he had for his granddaughter.

  “We don’t expect you not to love your daughter,” I told him. “Or have any of this affect your feelings for her.”

  “This case has been about Casey for far too long, and not enough about Caylee,” he replied.

  I couldn’t have agreed with him more and I told him so, which seemed to please him.

  I shared a few things with him that we were planning on doing at the trial, and he seemed comfortable with all of it. George lit up when I told him the first part of his testimony would be about Caylee. He really seemed to miss talking about her. For so long, everybody had been talking so much about Casey that Caylee was often forgotten.

  I told him how we had to prepare for the worst, even though the defense had withdrawn the names of Dr. Danziger and Dr. Weitz from its witness list. Now that we knew they had the molestation card in their hand, we didn’t know how or when they would play it. I told George how we would handle these accusations of sexual abuse, if they were made. That we were going to allow him to immediately deny and refute them. We were going to address them head-on if they were brought up. I took him through the various stages of his testimony, and what he should expect. All he needed to do was be truthful.

  George definitely seemed like he wanted to tell his story and tell it for the last time. He just wanted it done. The hardest part of our conversation was when I had to bring up his suicide attempt. I told him that if the defense was going to accuse him of killing Caylee, the strongest piece of evidence refuting that was the suicide note, and that really seemed to hit him hard.

  He made a comment along the lines of “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” that kind of thing. I think he was prepared to deal with it. It was best for both of us that he was prepared to talk about it, if it came up.

  As we were wrapping up, George turned to me and said, “I’m happy this trial is finally happening. This way I can finally know the truth.”

  I looked at him, and spent a brief moment looking into the eyes of a man that I’d spent nearly three years grappling with. In that time, I’d found him both maddeningly frustrating and tragically relatable. He didn’t deserve what he’d been put through—no one did. But still it was hard to ignore how even now, he could not totally confront what I felt was the
plain, undisputable truth: that Casey killed Caylee. Still, even if Casey was found guilty, even if the jury believed our version of the truth, that didn’t mean he’d be able to completely embrace the idea that his daughter was a killer, and it didn’t mean all his questions would be answered. That’s the tricky thing about justice. As much as I wanted to assure him that everything was going to be okay, I knew from every trial I’d ever worked on—from the traffic division to homicide—that justice rarely feels like you expect it to. I wanted to tell him that we’d finally know the facts, but I also had a responsibility to be brutally honest with this man, who’d spent too much time being lied to and lying to himself.

  “We probably will never really know the truth. The truth was buried inside Casey, and we just have to accept that we may never get to the bottom of it.”

  BUT WHAT OF OUR TRUTH? What about the truth that we on the prosecution had come to believe in? What was our version of the events? The evidence in the case told us that Casey had murdered her daughter, and the State had committed to allowing the jury to decide if it wanted to sentence her to death. As such, we’d spent nearly three years working a theory about how Caylee died. It wasn’t necessarily something we’d present to the court all in one place, it might not even be something that we would acknowledge altogether, but it was something we had to have for the broad outlines of the narrative we were presenting.

  As with all criminal cases, we the prosecution got our facts from the investigators and experts who have worked the case, and we had to build these facts into the best case we could at trial. After we had gotten the evidence from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, we knew our strong points and began to develop them. We knew Caylee’s skull had three pieces of duct tape across the nose and mouth. We had Casey’s tattoo, “Bella Vita,” so we had a strong motive that Casey desired a life not burdened by having a child. We had lots of evidence tying Casey to the homicide, the Winnie-the-Pooh blanket, the laundry bag, and of course, the duct tape. Furthermore, we had forensic evidence in the form of the odor and the hair analysis which demonstrated that Caylee had been in the trunk of the Pontiac.

  Casey had not reported her daughter missing for thirty-one days, a crime in itself in my mind. She had spun lies until they dead-ended and could go no further, about everything from a phantom nanny to where she worked to where she had been those four and a half weeks. In our opinion, none of this was the behavior of a grieving mother. Even though police had not given Casey a polygraph, I believe she was such a good liar she would have likely passed it anyway. A lie detector would only prove just how convinced she was of her own fictions.

  As happy as we were with our strong points, we had to consider our weak points as well. After all, absent a cause of death, this was a circumstantial case. To us, the presence of chloroform in the trunk pointed to Casey using it on Caylee, probably to knock her out. However, no chloroform was found in the Anthonys’ home when it had been searched. Similarly, there had been a “how to make chloroform” search performed on Casey’s computer in March of 2008, but three months had gone by before Caylee died, which left a gap between when she conducted the search and when the child was last seen.

  It would be harder to argue that Casey had used chloroform on Caylee when she had not made a more recent search, however, we had the evidence of chloroform in the trunk and we had discovered something interesting on Ricardo Morales’s MySpace page. An advertisement-style photo of a man and a woman on an upscale date in a restaurant mentions the powerful anesthetic. The man is leaning over the woman to kiss her neck, and in the hand obscured from her view is a man’s handkerchief. The caption states, “Win her over with chloroform.”

  This posting may have aroused Casey’s curiosity about the knockout potential of chloroform, and gotten her to thinking of using it. But we really weren’t sure how our chloroform theory would hold up in court. At the time, our computer forensics person had reported that there had been searches performed on the Anthonys’ home computer that included the word “chloroform,” “how to make chloroform,” and one search for “how to break a neck.”

  Another challenge was overcoming the fact that everyone said Casey was a good mother. Caylee never showed evidence of abuse or neglect. Friends of Casey said she was fond of her daughter, nobody had seen her become annoyed or short-tempered with her daughter. Caylee’s room was neat and tidy and filled with toys.

  This was an area where more candid testimony from Cindy Anthony would have been helpful. We knew from Cindy’s coworkers that Cindy had her own doubts about Casey’s parenting of Caylee and that Cindy felt Casey wanted to party too much rather than take care of her daughter. We also knew that some had even gone so far as to suggest to Cindy that she seek custody of Caylee, a drastic move to be sure, but also one that Cindy seemed to have considered. If Cindy had owned up to those conflicts with Casey—in police interviews, in depositions, and on the stand—we would have had a powerful rebuttal to defense claims of Casey as the perfect young mother. It wouldn’t have explained Casey’s jump to violence, but it certainly could have gone a long way to showing the jury where Casey’s priorities lay. Unfortunately we never got that level of cooperation from Cindy.

  Another hurdle was how the law severely restricted our ability to persuade the jury to focus on the victim. The appellate courts are very sensitive to attempts to evoke naked sympathy for the victim that may affect the jury. However, the courts rarely restrict the ability of the defendant to play the sympathy card under the guise of a legitimate defense. Even the best judge will often err on the side of excluding evidence about the victim that does not relate to an issue in the case.

  Ultimately, though, we thought the weak points of our case were minor, and easily surmountable with the right jury. We knew that in the opening remarks we would be safe introducing Caylee to the jury in a general way, but that eventually she would be reduced to a mere piece of evidence in the case. We could only hope the seed we planted early would be enough to make the jurors care enough about Caylee to sustain her image throughout the weeks. After that, it would be up to the jurors to keep her at the forefront.

  There is this common belief that jurors’ hearts go out to children who are the victims of homicide, but in my experience that is less the case when a parent is accused of the crime. They have a much easier time accepting the homicide when it has been committed by a stranger. It is too horrible to comprehend that a parent could kill his or her own child, especially one so young and defenseless. For a jury, maternal filicide was the most difficult crime of all.

  Our theory was as follows:

  What we knew of Casey was that the primary motivating force in her life was herself. There is a self-centeredness that comes with adolescence, and while most teens outgrow it, Casey never did. We knew we would never fully understand the real relationship between Casey and her mother. Cindy’s denial prevented that. But from everyone we’d talked to and from what we’d witnessed ourselves, we did know that there was conflict.

  George and Cindy had expectations of Casey, seeing that she was living in their home. They expected her to work and contribute to the household. Exactly why Casey didn’t work, we don’t really know. Maybe she was just lazy, maybe she wanted to spend more time with Caylee, or maybe she felt entitled and didn’t want to work. Eventually, lying about what she did during the day was easier than explaining to her parents why she was unemployed. But not working meant she had no money. Because she had created the illusion that she was employed, she couldn’t pretend she needed money, because supposedly she was making her own. Therefore, she started stealing from her parents, which soon became as easy as spinning her lies.

  Casey now had two things in her favor: she had her parents off her back because they thought she was working, and she had money skimmed from wherever she didn’t think it would be noticed. The problem remained that she was with Caylee 24/7. After spending the entire day with her toddler, she wanted to
get out in the evening to socialize, as any young adult would. However, based on our conversations with Cindy’s coworkers, we speculated that Cindy was hard on Casey about that. After all, Cindy thought Casey had already been out all day at her job, so to her, Casey going out at night meant she was shirking her responsibility as a mother. And of course, Casey couldn’t explain that she’d just been with Caylee for eight hours straight, because doing so would reveal the lie about her job.

  When she started a relationship with Ricardo Morales at the beginning of 2008 and wanted to be out late, she told her parents she had been promoted to event planner at Universal with flexible hours. It was brilliant. Now, any time she wanted, she could say she had to work in the evenings. When she wanted to spend the night at Ricardo’s, she used a made-up babysitter, Zanny, who had enough room in her apartment to have Caylee, or even both Casey and Caylee, spend the night. The plan was so well thought out that Casey came out looking incredibly responsible. If she “worked late,” she didn’t have to wake Caylee when she got off. In reality, she and Caylee would spend the night at Ricardo’s.

  In Casey’s eyes, Ricardo was a potential dad to Caylee. He wasn’t much of a party guy, preferring to stay home in the evenings. Casey, Caylee, and Ricardo were like a little family unit. Caylee fit right into this lifestyle. The next problem started when Casey started dating Tony Lazzaro.

  Tony was different from Ricardo. He was a night owl and a nightclub promoter. He had a totally different lifestyle that had no room for a little kid. Why not just leave Caylee with Cindy in that case? We thought it was probably because Casey didn’t want her mother all over her about ignoring Caylee, but we also knew that Cindy was growing frustrated with Casey’s entitled behavior. For a while, Casey had been dropping Caylee off at Gentiva, where Cindy worked, and basically taking advantage of Cindy as a babysitter whenever she wanted. We knew this from the depositions of Cindy’s coworkers, but Cindy herself always stonewalled inquiries about any conflict in the relationship, so we were left with just hearsay. However, something happened the night of June 15 that triggered a blowout.