Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony (52 page)

“My biggest fear,” she said, “is that common sense will be lost in all the rhetoric of the case.”

She implored jurors to look at the big picture of all of the evidence and what it revealed. When discussing the original kidnapping story, Linda asked jurors to consider its genesis and what it illustrated about Casey’s awareness of guilt, reminding them once again that Casey had multiple opportunities—both with investigators and with Cindy—to assert that Caylee’s death had been an accident. No such claim had been made—at least not until Casey was out of all other options.

As she began to wind down, Linda played the first call Casey made to home from jail and pointed out how it showed Casey’s real focus was on Tony, not Caylee. Referring to Casey as a pathological liar, Linda reminded the jury of the connection of the items found with Caylee’s body in the swamp to the Anthony house.

Ending as we had discussed, Linda told the jury that the only thing they needed to ask was whose life was better without Caylee. Linda then played Cindy’s frantic 911 call from when she had first learned Caylee was missing and referenced George’s suicide letter. But lastly she displayed the photograph of the
“Bella Vita”
tattoo and a photo from the hot body contest at Fusian. Pointing to the screen, Linda gave everyone a moment for the images to sink in before she said, “There’s your answer.”

And then we were done. Judge Perry read a lengthy list of instructions to jurors, all of which were fairly standard. The only point of note was that the instructions made clear that nothing any of the attorneys said in the case was evidence. The evidence could only come from witnesses. This meant that if the jury was following these instructions properly, they were not allowed to consider the unproven statements that Baez had made in his opening remarks. He hadn’t supported those points with actual evidence during the course of the trial, therefore the jury could not consider them.

The jurors stood up and filed out of the courtroom. With the instructions read, there was nothing to do but wait. If waiting for the verdict to be read is the worst part of a trial, waiting for the jury to reach a decision is second. We’d presented closing arguments on July 3 and July 4, so there was no time to enjoy the Fourth of July holiday. I spent the rest of July 4 in the office, waiting for the jury with my feet up watching TV on a set the secretaries had positioned so they could follow the trial. Toward the end of the day, I returned to the twenty-third floor so that I would be there when the judge released the jury for the day. I was sitting in a chair in the hallway playing a game on my phone when Jose approached me and we exchanged pleasantries for a bit before he said:

“You’re the toughest motherfucker I’ve ever been up against.”

I thanked him. It was good of him to say, even if the list of “motherfuckers” he’d been up against was pretty short. The gesture seemed genuine and I wish I could say it erased all the crap that I had been through in the last three years, but it didn’t. I have fought ferociously against attorneys many time and left the courtroom with them as friends. But there were times when I felt Jose misled me, and that is one thing I cannot forgive. 

On Tuesday, July 5, I slid into work feeling pretty good. It had been 1,085 days since Cindy Anthony first called 911. The morning was uneventful. No one was expecting anything that soon. That afternoon, Linda, Frank, and I grabbed lunch. No sooner had I returned to my office than my phone rang. The jury had reached a verdict. I hustled over to the courthouse, where I learned the jury’s decision: not guilty of first-degree murder, aggravated manslaughter, and aggravated child abuse; guilty of all four counts of lying to police.

A
FTER THE VERDICT, MEMBERS OF
the prosecution team met in a conference room with all of the investigators and State Attorney Lawson Lamar for a private discussion before meeting with the press. The defense team also appeared before the cameras for a press conference of their own. As hard as I may have been on Jose Baez in these pages, I thought his posttrial comments showed class and professionalism, and I commend him for them. Mason, however, indulged in some rather childish comments directed toward legal commentators who had dared to point out errors committed by his team. Again, the irony was rich, since Mason himself had once been one of those commentators. I might have written it off to the adrenaline rush of a verdict that he was not expecting, but shortly thereafter the childishness continued as he was photographed “flipping the finger” to media folks filming him and the team in a rather unseemly champagne party at a bar across the street from the courthouse. If he had wanted privacy, perhaps he should have partied in private. I would have expected a man of his age and reputation to have shown a bit more class.

As soon as the press conference was over, I was off to New York to break the silence that we had held for three years. Since then, I haven’t stopped talking about the case.

When I returned from New York, I took a few days to wrap up and pack up my desk. People throughout the office came up to me to express their frustration in the “not guilty” verdict, and to let me know that they were on my side, Caylee’s side. Then, I left the office I had worked in for thirty years for the final time. Where I was headed, I couldn’t say.

Disappointing though the verdict was, I refused to let it overshadow what I’d accomplished with the State Attorney’s Office. As with any retirement, there was a bittersweet air to things. I had used every skill I’d developed in my thirty years to get the jury to see the big picture. The team of investigators, prosecutors, and assistants did all that was humanly possible to do the same. Once that is done, all you can do is rest with the knowledge that you did everything anyone could do. As they say in sports, we left it all on the field.

A few weeks later, Linda and another friend, Sara Freeman, organized a retirement party for me at a local establishment. Many old friends from my homicide days in the nineties were there, men and women who had since retired. Seeing all those old and familiar faces, it was great to reminisce—not only because of how much fun it was, but also because it reminded me that this was not my only murder case. There were many other stories that I’d told to juries, many other crimes that I’d taken pride in bringing justice to. Looking at everyone from throughout my legal career gathered together, I was reminded that, in spite of all the difficulty this case had put me through, it might not have even been my hardest. And as much as it felt like an end, it might not even be my last.

During one of the rare moments I had to myself that night, I sat down at a small table on the periphery of the party. Glancing over the crowd, I thought back to that lunch with Linda three years before at the Daily News Café. In retrospect, it would have been so easy for me to simply turn her offer down, to say I wasn’t interested and quietly wait out until I’d hit my thirty years. It would have been so easy for me to pass the case on to someone else and simply coasted by. I certainly would have saved myself a lot of frustration.

But I’d wanted the case then. Now, sitting at my going-away party and knowing the outcome, I still understood why. I hadn’t wanted the case because of the spotlight. I hadn’t wanted the case for a shot at glory. In my past cases, I’d had both of those things. Alone, neither was enough to get out of bed in the morning, and they certainly weren’t enough to justify putting up with Jose Baez for three years.

No, I’d wanted the case because I thought it was worth fighting for. I was going to go out either way, and I can’t think of a better way to go out, than fighting for little Caylee Marie Anthony.

E
PILOGUE

I
n the wake of the verdict, a lot has been said about every aspect of the Casey Anthony case. Most vocal are the people expressing outrage at how this verdict was possible, reserving a uniquely powerful ire for Casey and, in at least one poll, naming her the most hated person in America. Perhaps a bit less loudly, people have criticized the jury for the decision they reached, wondering how it was possible for them to hear the evidence and reach such a surprising conclusion.

Likewise, people have found room to criticize our efforts in the prosecution. As a prosecutor who has taken part in cases like this before, I try not to put too much stock in the Monday-morning quarterbacking that goes on, but at the same time, I know it’s inevitable. In listening to the anger and the frustration that people have displayed, it’s been hard for me not to chime in in agreement, but I also know that these decisions and the forces that create them never have any easy answers. People around the country who passionately believe Casey was guilty still struggle with just how this woman was able to get away with it. It’s a frustration I share, and while there’s nothing to alleviate that, I do have some thoughts that might help put it in perspective.

Simply put, I think Jose Baez won in spite of himself. Time and time again, I saw how his lack of procedural knowledge hampered his ability to effectively represent his client. His defense was disjointed, his presentation questionable. Even now, after reviewing three years’ worth of motions, depositions, and witnesses, the defense’s strategy is nearly impossible to discern. Throwing everything out there and seeing what sticks has never been a viable defense strategy, in my mind. To say it was all smoke and mirrors implies there was some grand illusion that the defense worked the whole time. I think that gives them too much credit.

In many ways I think the defense came to mirror the client they represented. Just as Casey reacted when she reached the end of the hall, Baez took each leg of the defense as far as he could, and when he finally ran out of options, he just grabbed on to the next available thing—whether that thing was Zanny, Roy Kronk, or George Anthony. Standing back from it all, it’s very hard to find any aspect of their case credible when so much of it was dependent on Casey, the world’s least reliable narrator.

Of course, if Baez’s defense didn’t lead to the verdict, then what did? In the months since the verdict was handed down, I’ve asked myself that question about once an hour. There are no easy answers, but in hindsight, my belief is that the evidence as well as the makeup of the jury played large roles in how this decision was shaped.

First, to the evidence. As I’ve said before, you can only try a case with the evidence and the facts that you get from investigators, and in this case, despite the exhaustive efforts of the investigators and our experts, the evidence we had was entirely circumstantial. Now, plenty of murder cases gain convictions with purely circumstantial evidence; however, the caveat when trying a murder case with circumstantial evidence is that you need the jury to be willing to do a lot of work.

Furthermore, we’d always known that there were a couple of spots in the evidence that were problematic for us. Chief among them was not having a cause of death, but also we on the prosecution team could never effectively say exactly how Casey went from a search for chloroform in March to killing Caylee in June. We had our theories, of course, but there was never anything that we could say definitively and prove in court. Similarly, another barrier was that Casey, according to all the testimonies of her friends and family, had been a loving mother. If this were true, how did she become a cold-blooded killer?

Of course, there was no way for us to suddenly come up with a cause of death or prove that the events between March and June led to Casey killing her daughter, but the claim of Casey being a loving mother was an area where a more complete and candid testimony from Cindy could have been really beneficial. As Cindy’s coworkers had shown in our interviews with them, Cindy had her doubts about Casey as a mother. Because these interviews were based in hearsay and therefore inadmissible, Cindy alone had the power to show this to the jury. If Cindy had chosen Caylee over Casey, we might have been able to use Cindy’s testimony to make a stronger case for Casey as an irresponsible parent with more of a motive for murdering her daughter.

However, even with those shortcomings, we had an incredibly strong case. I’d always felt (and still do) that the presence of the duct tape showed clearly that this was first-degree murder. Couple that with Casey’s pattern of lies, her total lack of emotional response to the “accidental” death of her child, the smell in the trunk, Caylee’s hair, and the cadaver dog’s reactions, and I feel this demonstrates an undeniable level of guilt on Casey’s part.

While I believe that the evidence proves Casey is guilty of first-degree murder, it is possible to see why the jury might have disagreed with that specific charge. Perhaps they felt the burden of proof was just too high for murder one, which would carry the possibility of the death penalty. If that were the argument, I’d beg to differ with it, but on some level I could at least understand that response. But there were lesser charges the jury could have convicted on that would still have reflected Casey’s responsibility for her daughter’s death. What I find truly baffling though is that somehow they did not see the proof enough to convict her of a lesser murder charge or even manslaughter.

In the wake of the verdict, a frequent criticism has been that the state attorney should not have made this a capital case. Without the death penalty, the thinking goes, the jury would have almost certainly returned a “guilty” verdict, because they just couldn’t bring themselves to rob George and Cindy of their only daughter when they’d already lost their granddaughter. Of course, the obvious problem with this logic is that the jury would have been fully within its right to reject first-degree murder in favor of a lesser murder conviction that did not carry the death penalty. If they’d really felt she was guilty but did not want to award the death penalty, a lesser murder charge would have conveyed that point quite well. This verdict, however, was not the work of a jury that was concerned about the punishment; instead, this decision was the work of a jury who didn’t believe she deserved to be punished at all. To me the biggest legacy of this decision is not that Casey wasn’t convicted of first-degree murder, but that she got away scot-free.