Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story

by Golenbock, Peter; Baez, Jose

  The truth, as always, was less interesting than the accusations.

  There were numerous other people who claimed to be on the defense team who really weren’t, but I’m not going to write about them. The list of imposters involved with the case is too long already.

  Our opposition—the prosecution representing the state of Florida—consisted of three individuals, Linda Drane Burdick, the lead counsel, Frank George, and Jeff Ashton.

  Burdick had the reputation for being thorough, extremely professional, and tough. During the three-and-a-half years that we worked on the case, she lived up to each and every one of those qualities.

  The prosecution case was extremely complex. It had a stream of witnesses and a daunting amount of evidence. Organizing it all was a major task, and Burdick was in charge of it all.

  She took copious notes at every deposition. She documented everything, both the interesting and the mundane; of all the lawyers, I could see that easily she knew the most about the prosecution’s case. I qualify that by saying “on the prosecution’s side;” I was determined to know the case even better than she did. That was my biggest challenge because Burdick was a hard worker and was committed to the task.

  It drives me nuts that so many people think that Ashton was the lead prosecutor when he wasn’t. He was second chair. It was Burdick, not Ashton, who really put the nuts and bolts of this case together for the prosecution.

  Burdick and I got along. There were times, of course, when we disagreed and butted heads, but we always showed respect for one another. I don’t know how she truly feels about me, but I can say how I feel about her: I thought she did a fantastic job both before and during the trial.

  She excelled because of her thoroughness. She was a machine in that regard, though I felt it backfired somewhat during the trial. She lacked, well I don’t want to say personality, but when you’re mechanical as an advocate, you lose a little of the personal touch. I knew that while the jury would take in everything she said, she would be monotonic in her argument and in her case presentation.

  If Burdick had a chink in her armor, it was her extreme overconfidence in the state’s position. She didn’t for a second believe she would lose the case, though I can say at times she had a very realistic view of what the case was all about, including its weaknesses. She was the only one of the three prosecutors who acknowledged their case even had weaknesses, and she wasn’t as quick to jump the gun the way George and Ashton did.

  Of the three prosecutors, George was the most personable. He had a great sense of humor; he and I got along very well. We would both use humor to break the tension of the long hours, and I felt that it was George who kept the state’s team together emotionally.

  I never believed that Burdick and Ashton got along. I could see numerous times the two of them were at odds about how to handle the case. When Burdick got angry, her face would flush. I know this because she sometimes turned that anger on me. There were also times when it was directed at Ashton. I think they put up with each other more than they got along.

  The proof of that was after the trial when she backed her boss for state attorney rather than Ashton, who was running against him. After working closely with someone for so long, you would think there would have been more of a connection.

  As evidence of her lack of respect for Ashton, after he wrote his book Imperfect Justice, Burdick quipped that the book title should have been Imperfect Memory.

  That leaves me with Ashton. When the trial was over—a trial that I won and he lost—the last thing I wanted to be was unprofessional to my colleagues on the prosecution side and rub their faces in it. I would be trying more cases, and there was no reason to spike the ball in their faces and act inappropriately. And I made sure that I didn’t do that.

  My posttrial press conference was very subdued. I complimented the prosecutors on their work, thinking, Let’s leave it at that.

  Even before the verdict came back, I went up to Ashton, shook his hand, and told him I thought he tried a very strong case. And after the trial was over, I never gave Ashton a second thought. We were never going to be friends; he was insignificant to me. He had opposed me in a trial and treated me poorly, but the trial was over. As far as I was concerned, it was time to move on.

  I was hoping that even with all our battles and our head butting and his lack of fair play, perhaps it would be the end of this nonsense.

  But I was wrong.

  In his book he did nothing but bash me. It’s no secret he still harbors ill will against me; even after the publication of his book, he never misses a chance to go on television and take a cheap shot at me.

  It never bothered me that much because I learned through the trial to grow a thick skin, and now under my blue suit I have alligator skin. What bothered me was not what he said, but how much his words hurt my family.

  When I first met him, I thought, Okay, this guy is just a standard lifer prosecutor who has a way about him, believing that everyone is crooked but him. And whatever needs to be done, he believes the ends justify the means, no matter how unconstitutional or underhanded. But I have to tell you, there are prosecutors like Ashton in district attorneys’ offices across the country.

  I was shocked by how emotional he could be. It’s one thing to be passionate, but it’s another thing to be so emotional that it hurts you and your case. And from what I saw, he was emotionally unstable. When Ann remarked that Ashton was emotionally disturbed, I didn’t know what to say. I’m not a mental health professional, but I noticed that during the hundreds of hours we spent together, there were times when he would become just plain silly and act like a petulant child.

  For example, he filed a motion to find out how Casey was able to afford our famous experts, even though she didn’t have a job. He was accusing me of having a conflict of interest and of selling her story. He was accusing me of something unethical without any evidence whatsoever. But that was par for the course for him. Like a lot of his theories, it came from thin air inside his head.

  We had a closed-door meeting with Judge Stan Strickland on the motion, who found there was no conflict of interest. When we were back in open court, I requested that Strickland keep what was said in chambers private because of all the leaks that were coming from the prosecution.

  I could see Ashton getting red-faced and angry. I looked at him in pure amazement and then leaned over and said, “Are you all right?”

  “No, I’m not all right,” he started to scream. He just lost it completely, all on national television.

  The judge stepped in and scolded us both.

  I knew right then and there I could get under his skin whenever I wanted to. It was like playing with a child. That’s how easily I could do it; I did it intentionally many times during depositions and court hearings.

  The defense team joked that we should officially name Ashton as our fourth chair because his childlike behavior was doing us a world of good.

  We knew that come trial time, the longer the trial went on, the more I was going to be able to get under his skin and make him look like a complete jerk in front of the jurors. And true to form, that’s exactly what happened.

  After the trial one of the jurors said to a network reporter that Ashton was nothing but a “cocky asshole.” Another juror, the foreman of the jury, went on On the Record with Greta Van Susteren and said that the jury didn’t appreciate Ashton’s attitude. He said they didn’t like the fact that when he was questioning our bug expert about Caylee’s remains, he made a joke about “a pig in a blanket.” He was talking about a dead child, cracking jokes, and the jurors didn’t like it. They didn’t like his attitude and they certainly didn’t like his inappropriate laughter.

  I knew going into the trial that Ashton would be his own worst enemy. I also knew that going into the trial I would also benefit from the overconfidence of Burdick and the rest of the prosecution team.

  What the prosecution had, and what I didn’t have, was the media on its side.

&
nbsp; What I had, and what the prosecution didn’t have, was the evidence on my side.

  My defense team was ready to do battle.

  It was time to go to trial.

  CHAPTER 23

  PICKING A JURY

  BEFORE JURY SELECTION, I filed a motion for a change of venue. There was no way Casey could get a fair trial in Orlando. I was hoping the trial could be held in Miami or Broward County, where I felt jurors would be less likely to be poisoned by the publicity surrounding the case.

  Rather than move the trial, Judge Belvin Perry ruled that we were going to travel to another jurisdiction to pick a jury, bus them to Orlando, and then sequester them. That way we would not have to take the Casey Anthony Show on the road. The show would come to us. What Judge Perry wouldn’t do was tell us where we were to go to pick jurors. He was afraid the news would leak, the media would taint the area, and the end result would be we’d have to pick yet another area.

  Judge Perry, I have to say, derived a great deal of enjoyment from keeping this secret. He refused to even tell us, the lawyers, until a week before jury selection was to begin. We were frustrated because if we felt his choice of location wasn’t suitable, we wanted to be able to make a motion with some valid research behind it to show why his choice wasn’t valid.

  Judge Perry didn’t buy our argument.

  The day finally came when he told us. We had to hand him a list of everyone who needed to know—and he made us responsible for them—and so anyone not on that list who found out would be in violation of his order and would suffer his wrath.

  A day or two before, Judge Perry was spotted taking a tour of the courthouse of West Palm Beach. The media reported it, of course, but none of us bought that we were going there. Judge Perry was tightly keeping the secret, and we didn’t think he’d let it out of the bag that easily. It appeared to me that this was a decoy.

  Too bad. As I said, we wanted South Florida to contain the jury pool. No one cared about Casey Anthony in Miami, Broward County, and even as far north as West Palm Beach. We just didn’t think the case was that big a deal down there.

  Even before we found out where we were going to pick a jury, I was feeling strong. I walked into the court administrator’s office in Orlando, and I remember her telling me, “Jose, everyone here is going nuts, getting ready for this trial, but not you. You look so relaxed.”

  I had my second wind, working seven days a week, sixteen hours a day, practicing my opening and closing arguments. I started with the closing argument; I believe in doing that first because that’s where the journey ends. It’s where I want to get. I start with my goal, and I work backward.

  I had spent literally hundreds of hours on that. I had begun work on my opening statement, and I was confident.

  Then we were told of the location of the jury pool—St. Petersburg/Clearwater, which was only an hour and a half away. The media market overlapped with Orlando.

  Wait a minute. That’s just too close, I told myself. This is no good.

  I went to see Cheney Mason. We discussed it and decided to file an objection.

  Judge Perry called us into chambers. He was not happy. He had gone to a lot of trouble to pick this location and didn’t appreciate the defense causing trouble.

  We had told him earlier that the one place we did not want to go was the Jacksonville area. It’s a very conservative circuit, not to mention they had just had a missing child case where a child was found in a Dumpster. They caught the guy, and the whole community was outraged.

  Judge Perry said to us, “Well, if you’re not happy with St. Petersburg/Clearwater, then the only other place I’m going to be able to take you to is Jacksonville. So what I’ll do is start making arrangements for everyone to go there.”

  Checkmate. We withdrew our motion.

  THE DAY WAS SET for our caravan to travel to Clearwater. We had to pay for our own hotel rooms, and we didn’t have much money, so we stayed in a Quality Inn. The state stayed at a Marriott, a much better accommodation. We couldn’t afford much. We brought office equipment rather than buy new. Our law student interns packed together in a couple of rooms.

  We had Richard Gabriel, one of the best jury consultants in the country working with us, but a couple weeks before the trial Richard, who was from Los Angeles, had to resign. He had another trial about to begin, a paying job, and he couldn’t afford to work for us for nothing. Judge Perry said it would only take a week to pick a jury, but we knew it was going to be a lot longer than that.

  Richard said he would help us from afar, but unless a jury consultant can be in the courtroom, looking at the jurors face to face, he can’t be of much help, especially since the jury selection wasn’t going to televise the jurors’ faces.

  Days before jury selection, we began a search for a last-minute replacement. All the best ones had prior commitments, but then we found a woman by the name of Amy Singer, who from her website appeared to be a very reputable jury consultant. She agreed to do the job, but she had a conflict and couldn’t come down herself.

  “I’ll have one of my associates come down,” she said, “His name is Jim Lucas.”

  Jim hadn’t been on the original list I handed to Judge Perry, so I couldn’t even tell Jim where to go. He lived in West Palm Beach, so I told him to start driving north. The embargo was lifted at nine, and I called him on his cell and told him to drive to the courthouse near the St. Petersburg/Clearwater airport.

  He arrived in time. The first day we knew he wasn’t going to be of much use, so we told him to go to the back of the courtroom and take notes, and we’d discuss at the end of the day.

  That evening I asked him, “How many death penalty cases have you worked on?”

  “None,” said Jim. “I’m a trial graphics consultant. My company just does trial exhibits. I’m not a jury consultant. Amy asked me to come down here to take notes.”

  What the … was my first thought. My co-councils, Dorothy Clay Mills and Cheney Mason, were flabbergasted, but I was always trying to make lemonade out of lemons. He’s a graphics expert. That’s perfect. We could really use someone like that for this case. He might even be better than a jury consultant.

  And the way it turned out, he was, big time.

  WHEN I FOUND OUT that Jim wasn’t a jury consultant, I said to myself, The heck with it. I’m going to do my own market research.

  That night I said to Dorothy and Jim, “Let’s go get some oysters.” We drove around, away from the busy part of Clearwater, and went to a local seafood restaurant on the beach. We were asked if we wanted a table, but I told them I wanted to sit at the bar.

  While Dorothy was getting to know more about what Jim did, I turned to the lady on my left and struck up a conversation. We talked about everything, and then we finally got around to the trial.

  First of all, she didn’t recognize me, which I thought was wonderful. And I asked her about the trial, and she said, “Oh yeah, the Casey Anthony trial is here.”

  “How much do you know about the case?”

  She said she was a crime junkie. She watched all the court TV shows and the Law and Order shows, and she followed the news. But as much as she followed it, as much as she proclaimed herself to be a trial junkie, she didn’t recognize me.

  I asked her what she knew about the evidence in the case. All she could tell me was, “The kid was missing for thirty days. The mother didn’t call the police. She went out partying. The meter reader found the little girl in the woods.”

  She was there with her boyfriend, who was into the beach scene, and he didn’t know much about the case at all.

  I was shocked. I thought, I’m not getting the dirty looks I was getting in Orlando. Even though it’s only an hour and a half away, these people have lives to live. They’re not following the case the way the people in Orlando are.

  I thought, This is actually a better area than I thought it would be.

  About twenty minutes into the conversation, she finally said, “Wait a minute. You’re
the lawyer, aren’t you? I knew you looked somewhat familiar, but I couldn’t place you.”

  Every time we went out to dinner, I did the same thing. I’d go to the bar and strike up a conversation with people, trying to get a feel for the Clearwater area and what kind of people comprised the community. I found them to be somewhat liberal, and I loved it. They were like the Key West people I knew, but Key West is more conservative because of issues related to alcohol.

  I couldn’t believe the gold mine Judge Perry had found for us.

  Jury selection took three weeks. Going into the trial we had a general idea of what kind of jurors we wanted. We didn’t want any young mothers, especially single mothers, because they would be comparing themselves to Casey saying, “I never would have reacted that way.”

  We wanted to shy away from women in general because we thought they’d be more critical of Casey. We wanted males over the age of forty-five, closer to fifty and sixty. They would look at Casey as a young girl, and they’d have sympathy for her.

  The thing about generalizations: they’re weak. My experience after forty-five jury trials tells me that you always have to look at the individual characteristics of each juror. They always trump your generalities.

  At this point Dorothy, our secret weapon, took over. Dorothy set up her research team at the Quality Inn that resembled Gene Hackman’s team—all those people doing research—in The Runaway Jury. Except we were doing it ghetto style, which means on a budget.

  Dorothy and seven interns from the College of Law at Florida A&M used social media to do their research. We would get a list of jurors in the jury pool in the courtroom, and the second it was handed to us, Dorothy would type in the names and biographical information into her computer and send it to the nerve center back at the hotel. The interns would spring into action, checking all different websites, review sites, LexisNexis, etc., in order to accumulate as much information as possible on each potential juror.