Imperfect Justice

by Jeff Ashton

  It’s interesting that Casey actually did a very good job of concocting a new lie that incorporated small bits of fact. That was the beauty of being able to wait until all the evidence was in and make up a story. That way you could make sure it all fit. One example: the defense had one tiny discreet fact, the fact that when Casey went to a wedding looking like she had been gaining a lot of weight, and the family hadn’t acknowledged she was pregnant yet. That one fact was all Jose needed to sell the entire broad idea of a dysfunctional family to the jury.

  If you look at Casey’s background, this was her greatest gift, her ability to concoct believable lies that had just enough truth in them to fool the gullible. This defense was classic Casey, and from everything I saw in the case and heard from that side, I had no doubt that the meek, mild little waif the jury was seeing was running the show in the back room. Jose was the mouthpiece, but Casey was the architect. We had hoped the jury would have seen that through all the presentation of evidence, this was Casey 4.0, the next lie.

  Baez was actually arguing that the fact that George and Cindy would be testifying at their daughter’s trial about facts in the case was akin to throwing her under the bus and evidence of family dysfunction. I didn’t know if the jury specifically bought that part, but arguing that George and Cindy testifying meant there was something amiss with the family offended me. It was as if the love of Cindy and George for Caylee and their desire to know the truth were strikes against them. Casey was so egocentric, all that was supposed to matter to them was Casey, they should basically do anything for her. Jose was insinuating that a good father would have kept his mouth shut and that only Casey should matter. But surely Caylee would matter to the jury.

  Baez acknowledged that the Anthonys were religious about removing the ladder to the family’s aboveground pool so that Caylee could not get into it. He then proceeded to suggest to the jury that on June 16, they left the pool ladder up. He didn’t give a reason why they left the ladder like that; he just wanted the jury to believe it because he said so. Would jurors prefer to accept Jose’s completely unprovable speculations than what the witnesses actually said?

  Moving confusingly to more speculations, Jose argued that George, by reporting the gas cans missing on June 24, was somehow trying to implicate Casey. However, Baez never suggested why George would want to implicate her, or why, having been allegedly involved himself, he would want the police alerted at all. Like so many of Baez’s arguments, this was one that, if you truly thought it through, didn’t make any sense.

  In the end, though, maybe it didn’t matter what held up under the scrutiny of daylight. Perhaps I may have been giving the jury too much credit. I think he may have had a better understanding than I did of the level of analysis that this jury would take part in, and maybe his philosophy was “let’s just throw everything up against a wall and see what sticks.” If you throw one hundred red herrings out there, maybe you can get each juror to pick a different one. But the gas can argument, in particular, just never made any sense to me.

  Similarly, the line “Follow the duct tape and it will show you who put Caylee’s remains where they were found” was another of Jose’s arguments, which implied that it was George. However, Baez then backtracked strangely, saying, “Maybe not.”

  Baez’s next alternative was the meter reader theory. Roy Kronk was a morally bankrupt person who took Caylee’s body and hid it at the Suburban Drive location, Baez said, another argument for which he would present not one bit of evidence. He went on to say that the sheriff’s office had searched the area where the body was found before December and found nothing, another “fact” that was not a fact at all. I was surprised that the defense didn’t abandon the Roy Kronk argument. It didn’t fit with the overall “blame George” defense, and not even Baez had claimed a connection between George and Kronk.

  It also tickled us that Jose got up in front of the jury and argued how disreputable and morally bankrupt Kronk was for selling a photograph of his snake carcass, with interview, for $20,000, when Baez had engineered Casey’s sale of Caylee’s pictures to ABC for $200,000. Indeed the irony, once again, was rich.

  Kronk had always been a difficult part of this case for us. He clearly had not been completely forthcoming about finding the body in December, why he went there, and why he was embellishing his story. As difficult as Roy Kronk was, clearly he did not place the skull there. There was no question about that. So that was an interesting choice on Baez’s part, to go with that argument. He did a good job with it, though once again it was only effective so long as you didn’t think too hard about it.

  It was Jose’s strategy of arguing both sides, “maybe he did it, maybe he didn’t,” that he put forth about both George Anthony and Roy Kronk. It was also so ludicrous to accuse two different people, completely unconnected to each other, of putting the duct tape on the child. I thought surely the jury would see this. According to Jose, either George put the tape on Caylee and it was there from the day she died, or Kronk put the tape on Caylee later, after she died. Jose had no logical motive for either man to do so. Connecting George to the duct tape on the gas cans was meaningless. Hearing this argument was probably the time when I first began smile-smirking as I sat at the prosecution table. I am not proud of that behavior, but at least I was not breaking out in laughter at the ridiculousness of the paradox. It’s all relative.

  Baez also asserted that the only evidence connecting anyone in the home to the remains was the duct tape, which is absolutely false. There were a number of other things that connected the remains to the house; they’d see that in the evidence.

  As the opening drew to a close, Baez raised the idea that George’s suicide attempt was an indicator that he was somehow complicit. He implied that there was information in the suicide note, although he did not elaborate. I decided at that moment to have Yuri Melich get the letter and find some way to get it into evidence.

  My ears perked up when Baez twisted the story, saying that the defense was not saying that George killed Caylee. I knew Casey had told both of the shrinks that that her father had drowned her daughter. I thought we might be witnessing the birth of Casey 5.0. Would she really change the story again, in the middle of the trial?

  As an attorney, it’s mind-blowing how effective you can be when you are not limited by the truth. Attorneys are immune from libel or defamation in court. An attorney can say anything during his opening remarks and not be sued, so that he doesn’t have to do his opening looking over his shoulder. On the other hand, to me, it is unethical for a lawyer to spout whatever he wants in an opening statement without a good-faith belief that he will be able to prove it at trial. It did not appear that Baez shared my convictions on that matter.

  If Baez knew that Casey was not going to testify, then it would be considered unethical to float such inflammatory accusations against George without qualifying them. Of course, Baez could always justify introducing statements like this by saying “Well, I thought she was going to testify.”

  But that’s again one of the mysteries of this case. Baez planted the idea that there was some deeper psychological issue with Casey knowing that he couldn’t prove it. I’m still dumbfounded that he was able to get this jury to assume things without proving them. I don’t think I have ever had a trial before where a jury was so eager to assume facts favorable to the defendant without actually making the defense prove them. But, hey, I give Baez credit, he got them to do it.

  The prosecution team hoped that by hearing about the progression and tweaking of her lies, the discovery of Caylee’s body, and the connection of that crime scene with the Anthonys’ home, the jurors could interpret the defense’s opening, filled with unsupportable allegations, as just another of Casey’s lies. But of course that would require some intellectual effort and some actual thought on the part of the jurors.

  The jury is instructed that what the attorneys say is not evidence. Their job is to express so
me skepticism toward both sides and say, “Okay, now prove it.” We knew we could prove Linda’s claims in opening, and we knew Baez couldn’t prove most of his. We could only hope the jury would do its job.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE BIG SHOW

  Planning the order in which we would call the witnesses was the part of the case preparation I really enjoyed. The order can be complex, especially in a case of this magnitude. Sometimes it is driven by consideration of legal requirements for the admission of evidence. You have to connect a piece of evidence to the case before the jury can see it. Sometimes that may require testimony from multiple witnesses. You may have to call a few cops who had casual contact with a suspect before you can get to the one who took the confession. Sometimes decisions are driven by what your choices allow the other side to do. A delay in presenting a certain part of a witness’s testimony, or leaving it out entirely, may affect the ability of the other side to effectively contradict him. You must consider the emotional impact the testimony will have and how it will affect the jury’s view of what comes next. Lastly, there is the attention span of the jurors to consider; you can’t expect them to stay awake through too much complex testimony back-to-back.

  In total we were planning on calling approximately seventy witnesses. Of those, ten or so were going to be particularly important, including George and Cindy, Dr. Vass, and our medical examiner, Dr. G. The key pieces of evidence would be the findings of smell and chloroform in the trunk, the testimony of the cadaver dog’s handler, and the hair from the trunk.

  Linda, Frank, and I set up a dry-erase board in one of the offices and started mapping out our witness chart. Linda is a fan of color-coding. I would often tease her about her affinity for colored-dot stickers on everything. She marked Frank’s witnesses in red, my witnesses in blue, and her witnesses in green. This way, we would know at a glance which witness was assigned to whom. The order of the witnesses was largely mine to plan, with tweaks from Frank and Linda. I think I just enjoyed this stuff more than they did, so they deferred to me. My plan was to play the case out in a mostly chronological order. We’d start with George and the events of June 16. From there, we’d move into the thirty-one days through testimony from the friends of Casey, plugging George, Cindy, and Lee in for those portions of testimony where they belonged. After that, we’d look at the Pontiac—how it was towed, George’s discovery of the smell, and retrieving the car. The plan was that this would involve the jury in the mystery, leaving them wondering for days of testimony, What the hell happened to Caylee?

  That led us naturally into all the events of July 15, the day Caylee’s disappearance was confirmed. We’d tap Cindy and Casey’s behavior, the involvement of the police, Yuri Melich’s entrance as lead investigator, the Universal wild-goose chase, and then the arrest. The jury should be ready for something a little drier now, so we would then move to the forensics of the car, the dog alerts, the odor evidence, the hair evidence, and tying the chloroform to the searches on the computer. This evidence would give the jury a peek at the answer they’d been seeking for a week: What happened to Caylee?

  After all that, we’d give their intellects a rest and hit them emotionally with the calls Casey made to her family from jail and the jail visitation videos, showing the jury her true colors. Then we’d drop Casey 3.0, the “Caylee kidnapped by Zanny at Blanchard Park story” we’d heard from Lee, on them. Lee had heard that story from Casey in the fall of 2008, so going chronologically we would next move to December 11, 2008, the discovery of Caylee’s body. All the evidence that flowed from that event would produce our next chunk of witnesses.

  The tattoo was the one thing I wanted to take out of order. I wanted to save that for last. I felt it was a verification of our theory and Casey’s most vivid expression of life without Caylee.

  After we had learned about Casey’s newest accusations and Baez’s newest plan of attack, we’d debated changing the order of our witnesses, but ultimately we decided to still call George first. Our thinking was, if the defense was going to accuse George of molestation and covering up Caylee’s death, then opening with George was a perfect plan. It would allow him to refute the accusations right off. Although we would lose the mystery of Caylee’s whereabouts, we’d gain the jury’s savvy that everything it was hearing was thirty-one days of lies. They’d know for certain that these were lies, because they’d know Caylee was dead.

  The trial was still in Day One when George, tense but ready, neatly dressed in a white button-down shirt, sat down in the witness box. I asked him a series of questions about the events leading up to June 16, and he did well. George said everything he’d said all along, and he said it with a great deal of feeling. His emotions were real—both his joy when he talked about Caylee and his sadness when he talked about never seeing her again. Now I had to address the defense’s bombshell, the alleged molestation of Casey.

  Whereas my initial questions were asked in a conversational tone with appropriate pauses for the emotional moments, the next questions were very deliberate and emphasized every word. I asked him if Caylee had drowned, and he had gotten rid of the body. He choked up when he answered that he would never do such a thing. Meanwhile, Casey was shaking her head and rolling her eyes, directing her theatrics at the jury. She glanced at her father only long enough to cast him a glare, although he never made eye contact with her.

  Painful as it was, I next had to bring up the allegations of sexual abuse. If Baez’s opening was any indication, the defense was going to use this claim to justify Casey’s thirty-one days of silence. They’d say she hadn’t told anyone about her daughter’s death or her father’s role in its cover-up because she was a master secret-keeper; she’d been keeping them since the age of eight, when her father supposedly began to molest her.

  I asked George right out, “Have you ever molested your daughter?” He got kind of quiet. I could tell it hurt him, but he emphatically said no. As for all the other allegations, he very, very adamantly denied them all.

  Day One was over, and George had done a great job under fire. He hadn’t lost his cool, which was sometimes a problem, and he’d been honest and believable. Linda, Frank, and I left the courthouse feeling very good about the first day of what would certainly be a long trial.

  DAY TWO WAS FRANK’S TURN to take the floor. He was our “friends of Casey” prosecutor, and the day was filled with them. He had the unenviable job of trying to coordinate all the twentysomethings who, by this time, had scattered all over the country. Many weren’t happy to be connected to Casey, so in terms of witness management, Frank’s list was the most challenging.

  His medley of witnesses started out with testimony from Tony Lazzaro’s roommates: Cameron Campana, Nathan Lezniewicz, and Roy “Clint” House. Frank did a terrific job of showing how freely Casey’s lies flowed by using these three young men to confirm the stories she’d been telling to justify Caylee’s absence.

  Next on the stand was Brian Burner, the Anthonys’ next-door neighbor. Casey had borrowed a shovel from him on June 17, 2008, and we considered his testimony additional evidence that Casey had tried to dispose of Caylee’s body. Two shot girls from Fusian, Jamie Realander and Erica Gonzalez, followed Burner. All told, there would be twenty-one “friends of Casey” called to testify. We were trying to impress by sheer numbers how many people Casey had partied with, duped, or lied to. We wanted to show that no one, not a casual friend or a best bud, was immune from her deceptions.

  We did make a misstep with one of these early “friends of Casey’s,” a woman named Maria Kissh. She was an acquaintance of Casey’s and the girlfriend of one of Tony’s roommates. She testified that she had been in the Pontiac at some point following Caylee’s disappearance, and that there had been no odor in the car. In her original statement, Maria had said that she had been in the car; however, she had not specified when. During her testimony, Frank asked her when she had been in the car anyway, and her response w
as June 16, which surprised us all. This left the door open for Jose to promote his theory that the body was never in the car.

  Thankfully, her testimony was repaired through the testimony of Tony Lazzaro, who explained that Maria had been in the car before Caylee disappeared, not after. Problem solved, but it gave us all a bit of heartburn.

  Tony’s testimony introduced another issue bigger than that of Maria Kissh, however. During the early investigation, we’d learned that before her arrest Casey had told Tony she’d been molested—although not by George, but by Lee. When Baez cross-examined Tony, he asked him questions about the confidences he’d shared with Casey. We knew exactly where he was going, and we also knew the dangers. By sharing the conversation that had passed between Tony and Casey, Baez was introducing hearsay by Casey. Doing so would mean that Casey’s past character was an addressable issue, and as a result, the prosecution would be able to bring up Casey’s criminal past—her prior convictions for check fraud against her friend Amy Huizenga.

  For the time being, we stuck with our objection to Baez’s line of questioning as hearsay. Judge Perry sent the jury back to their hotel and met with us and the defense together. He wanted to decide for himself if what Tony had to say about Casey’s confidences was admissible to the jury. He began by asking him when Casey first told him about her brother’s alleged misconduct.

  “It was either around June 30, 2008, or July 5, 2008,” Tony recalled.

  Judge Perry asked him if he knew what Lee had done. Tony said Lee had tried to feel his sister’s breasts, but Casey said he was unsuccessful. Next, Judge Perry wanted to know if Casey mentioned anything inappropriate on her father’s part. “Could you relate to us what she said occurred in terms of abuse with Mr. Anthony, as in much detail as you can recall?”