Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (54 page)

Ashton objected.

“The question is beyond the scope of the direct examination,” Ashton said.

Judge Perry: “Sustained.”

I asked George about the duct tape.

“Objection. The question is beyond the scope of the direct examination,” Ashton said.

I asked George why he had hired a lawyer within twenty-four hours of his calling the police.

“Objection. The question is beyond the scope of the direct examination,” Ashton said.

“Sustained.”

I asked him if he put the duct tape on the gas cans.

“Objection. The question is beyond the scope of the direct examination,” he said.

“Sustained.”

I asked him about the smell of decomposition in Casey’s car.

“Objection. The question is beyond the scope of the direct examination,” Ashton said.

Judge Perry: “Sustained.”

The prosecution had made a decision to call George up to the stand multiple times during the case, thereby trying to limit some of my cross-examination. But there is a case called
Blue v. State
that says it’s an abuse of discretion for a judge to restrict cross-examination if it’s reasonably related to the defense. All of my questions had been reasonably related, even if they were beyond the scope. Judge Perry should not have sustained Ashton’s objections, and I was somewhat thrown off by this. I had never heard of not being able to go after a witness.

Casey was on trial for her life, and I should have been allowed to attack George the way I wanted to, especially with his being the focus of our defense. But it was another one of those moments where I had to adapt. We were playing by new rules, and I was going to have to change the way I played the game in order to adjust to them.

This is like starting a game and changing the rules in the middle of it
, I thought to myself.

I sat myself down and gave myself a talking to.

I’ll have time to regroup and really come after George harder,
I decided. And this is why I say calling George first was the prosecution’s best move, but it was also its worst move, because I knew this was going to be a long trial, and I would have many more shots at him. As a result, I wasn’t too concerned I wasn’t able to follow the fireworks of my opening statement with a boom.

Afterward I heard all the boo birds.

“Doesn’t Baez know Law School 101? You don’t go beyond the scope.”

“He kept trying to go outside the scope. What does he think he’s doing?”

The haters were saying, “He did a great job during the opening, but he really flopped during his cross of George.”

The truth is, those people didn’t know what they were talking about. They hadn’t a clue.

The jurors would forever have the opening statement as a map of where this case was going to go, and that was the biggest impact of the day—not George’s denials, for I would have multiple shots at him.

And that was the prosecution’s biggest mistake.

If it had put George on at the beginning of the trial and only given me one shot at him, I probably would have scored a few points, but they would have gotten lost and forgotten as the case went on.

What the prosecution did was make George the central part of its case, and he was a
horrible, horrible
witness. The state called him a bunch of times, and we called him twice, and each time I got to take my blows at him.

The smarter move by the prosecution would have been to put him up once and get him out of there, but it just kept parading him up there. And I just kept going at him. Rather than going for a head shot in the first round to try to knock him out, instead what I did was I hit him with body shots throughout the entire six weeks of the trial. By the time the trial was over, he was done.

One of my favorite sayings is, “Persistence beats resistance every time.”

By the time I was done with George, not only did the jurors believe he had something to do with the cover-up, but they even began to question whether he had intentionally murdered Caylee.

W
HENEVER
G
EORGE TESTIFIED
, and later when Cindy testified, Casey would get angry and would become more and more animated. She’d shake her head no. She’d make facial expressions, and I would constantly be on her about the faces she was making.

I was really angry with her. This was one of the three or four times during the trial when she and I would really go at it.

“I’m human,” she’d say to me.

“I don’t want you to be human,” I’d reply. “I want you to sit there and not react to the evidence. Because at this point you’re behaving no better than Ashton.”

“People don’t like it,” I would tell her. “They’re watching you.”

One thing different about this case: we were facing the jury the entire time. Usually the defense table is off to one side, and you sit far away from the jury. This time we were face-to-face with the jury, and I think that worked in our favor.

“You need to stop that shit,” I’d tell Casey.

And in fairness to her, I was asking her to do the impossible, which was to be emotionless during this incredibly emotional event she was going through.

At a certain point she realized she was disappointing me, and she’d keep her emotions in check. Overall, Casey did an excellent job keeping her emotions intact.

“I need you to keep focused on the task at hand,” I kept telling her. “I can’t be watching you. I can’t spend my time thinking about what you’re up to.”

A
FTER CALLING
G
EORGE
, the prosecution for the next two weeks trotted out what they called The FOC-kers—Friends of Casey—to the stand. Their purpose was to talk about how she acted as though nothing was wrong—going to parties, smiling a lot, getting a tattoo—all of which was supposed to impress upon the jury that Casey wasn’t at all sad over the disappearance and then death of her daughter.

The way the prosecution was figuring it, if the jurors saw that Casey had no remorse, then obviously she must have murdered her daughter. And why not do this? After all, the prosecution had spread these stories to the media, which had unanimously found Casey guilty of murder long before the trial began. In fact, after the media got through with unfairly and unconscionably besmirching her character, she was the most hated woman in America.

If it could convince the public, it figured, it could convince a jury.

The only difference, of course, is that for a jury to find Casey guilty of murder, the prosecutors had to come up with something called
evidence
. They would be hard-pressed to do so. Instead, the prosecution called her friends in an attempt to find her morally corrupt.

The first of the Fockers was Cameron Campana, one of Tony Lazzaro’s two roommates. By calling Cameron, the prosecution was trying to show the jury that naughty Casey was living with three guys in a small apartment. I objected to his line of questioning, but Judge Perry overruled me.

I wanted to make a strong statement with the first witness, so that the jury could see how irrelevant these witnesses were, and in this case less was more.

“Where you in Casey’s home on June 16, 2008, when Caylee drowned?” I asked Cameron.

“No,” he said.

“Thank you,” I said. “No further questions.” The courtroom was stunned with a moment of silence—expecting much, much more. But the brevity of it made an impact.

The next witness was Nathan Lezniewicz, the third of the roommates. When Nathan took the stand, Ashton went to show him a photo of Casey at the Fusion nightclub as she was participating in a hot body contest.

I objected.

“This photo is clearly to show bad character,” I said.

Judge Perry overruled me.

My co-counsel Cheney Mason then rose and moved for a mistrial under the
Mena v. State
case.

“This photo is not related to consciousness of guilt,” said Cheney.

“Denied,” said Judge Perry.

Frank George then asked Nathan whether he ever saw Casey distraught, depressed, scared, angry, or worried.

He said no.

“Did she ever go look for Caylee?” asked George.

“No.”

On cross I got Nathan to admit that during the few times he saw Casey with Caylee the little girl was well fed, well taken care of, and that Casey never yelled at her.

A final question: “Were you present on June 16, 2008, at the Anthony home when Caylee drowned in the pool?”

“No.”

George then questioned Clint House, who at one time lived with Tony and Cameron. Clint testified that Casey seemed like a “fun, party girl.” George then wanted to ask him about a photo of Casey dancing.

I objected, but was overruled.

Maria Kish, who was Clint’s girlfriend at the time, was next, and George got her to say that Casey really didn’t have much to do with the shot girls, and then at the end of the testimony he gave me a special gift. He asked Maria a question that he didn’t know the answer to.

George asked her, “Did you ever have occasion to ride in her car?”

Maria said yes.

“When was that?”

She said she couldn’t remember, but it was
while
Casey was staying with Tony, which was the time period that the prosecution was arguing Caylee was decomposing in the trunk. She said she rode in the backseat of Casey’s car with Tony and Clint.

Now it was my turn to cross-examine.

“When you sat in the backseat,” I asked, “did you smell any foul odor?”

“No, sir.”

“And Clint was with you in the backseat?”

“Yes.”

“And did Clint say something stinks back here or anything like that?”

“No, sir.”

“Okay, what about Tony. Did he say, ‘Boy, does this car stink?’”

“No, sir.”

And that really hurt them badly. It made the smell coming from the garbage a much more plausible explanation.

I had no idea Maria was going to testify to that. I never really thought, based on their sworn statements to law enforcement, that any of the Focker witnesses were very important to our defense. Until then.

It was a blunder on their part, a gift from the prosecution.

T
HEY CONTINUED TO CALL
more Fockers, and I was able to get each one of them to testify to what a great mother Casey was. The Fockers were relatively insignificant witnesses up to the point where they put Tony on the stand. Tony talked a great deal about what Casey did during the thirty days Caylee was missing, and he testified to the issue of her not having any remorse, acting like nothing was wrong.

Then the prosecution asked Tony to discuss the “party photos.” These were photos of Casey at the club Fusion having a good time. In one photo, for everyone including the jury to see, Casey was entered in a hot body contest. How those pictures were relevant to anything, I don’t know, but I kept objecting, and Judge Perry kept overruling me. It didn’t seem fair.

Under the law, the prosecution is not allowed to show evidence to show a defendant’s lack of remorse because it’s so subjective and unreliable. It is not only irrelevant; it is contrary to the law and is reversible error. A reversible error is an error serious enough to cause a reversal on appeal.