Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (49 page)

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.

T
HE 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.

W
HEN
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.

What they found was amazing. They did criminal background checks, and we’d know if a juror was lying when asked if ever arrested for a crime. They’d find books a juror reviewed on Amazon. They’d find items they purchased, and they’d read websites if they had them, look up domain names, and find car registration. We even searched social media websites. We certainly live in the information age.

We were really on top of things, rocking and rolling with the seven volunteer law students cooped up in a hotel room with Dorothy leading the way.

It’s a good thing we were able to find the criminal records of the jurors, because at the start the prosecution was not sharing that information with us. Usually the prosecution runs background checks and shares that information with the defense. Not in this case. It was waiting until
after
the questioning of the juror was done, and only then would they bring it out. It didn’t matter. Thanks to Dorothy and her interns, we had the information ourselves.

During the first couple days of jury selection, we were working around the clock, questioning potential jurors individually. Hundreds were excused for hardship, meaning they couldn’t be sequestered in Orlando and leave their homes for two months, or leaving their job was a financial hardship. We had to be in court at eight thirty in the morning, and we would not stop until seven at night. The process seemed endless.

By the time we got back to the hotel, it was eight at night, and then we held meetings to discuss what had happened that day, what jurors we liked, what jurors we didn’t like, and what our plan was going to be for the next day. And when our meeting was over, I’d grab a bite to eat, and then I’d meet with Jim and his partner Tyler Benson, and we’d go over designing graphics for my opening statement.

I had planned out my opening statement, but now that I had a graphics expert at my disposal, I had to start from scratch, because I now could incorporate a visual presentation that was going to make the opening so much more persuasive and impactful. We had to pull photos and other exhibits to make a complete visual presentation.

We’d finish around two in the morning, and then I’d go to bed, and I had to be up at seven so I could be in court again at eight thirty.

After a couple days of this, I began to get sick from exhaustion.

After a session in court, we took a break, and I started to feel nauseous. I went into the bathroom and started vomiting. Cheney came in to see if I was all right, and I almost passed out.

“That’s it,” he said, “We have to stop.”

He saw I couldn’t continue.

Cheney went and told Judge Perry. I was able to straggle into his chambers, and Judge Perry was very, very considerate—surprisingly considerate. He took one look at me, and he canceled court for the day right then and there.

Casey was having lunch, and she was brought back to court. I told I her that I wasn’t feeling well. The media wasn’t told anything.

I took a little medicine and got into bed. I awoke a couple hours later, and decided,
I’m just going to stay in bed all day.

After a couple more hours, I turned on the television to see what was on the news about the case.

It was pure madness. One station speculated that I was driving to the appeals court to appeal one of Judge Perry’s rulings. Another was replaying a video of Casey talking to me at the defense table. The reporter, trying to read her lips, decided what she was saying was, “Get me a plea.” They were sure our objective now was to get Casey a plea deal. A third television station stated unequivocally that I had quit.

What the hell,
I said to myself.

I sent texts to a couple reporters I dealt with saying, “None of the rumors are true. We ended court today on a private matter. Jury selection will resume tomorrow.”

That then made the news, accompanied by commentary that went something like this:

“He’s lying.”

“Do we believe him?”

“Maybe he’s not telling the truth.”

Jesus,
I said to myself,
why did I even bother?

When I got back to court the next day after being sick, Judge Perry took me aside, and he was very gracious and nice. He asked me if I was feeling better; it was truly the nicest he had ever treated me.

I always wanted him to like me, and at times I felt he did, but unfortunately more times than not I had the feeling he hated me. I still don’t know why.

The hardest part about jury selection for me was the fatigue. There was even one point when I was selecting the jury when I made a Freudian slip and asked to use one of my peremptory challenges to remove Judge Perry, who got a chuckle out of it. But the reason that happened was the fatigue. Once the trial itself began, I was fine. But until then, I was working around the clock picking the jury and redoing my opening argument. It was almost too much to bear.