Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [100]
In April 2009, when we announced our decision to seek the death penalty, the defense was required by law to have a qualified death penalty case lawyer on its team. There was talk that Terrie Lenamon would reenter the picture, but he did not want to come back on board. In an interview with Orlando Sentinel columnist Hal Boedeker in May 2009, Lenamon explained his decision. For starters, he had had few interactions with Casey. He also said that he and Baez had “a disagreement over strategy over mental-health mitigation,” a statement that I interpreted as meaning that Lenamon had suggested a route to take and Baez had disagreed with him. Because Baez was lead counsel, his way prevailed.
In his interview with Boedeker, Lenamon went on to say that he felt media attention was going to be a problem for the case. Furthermore, Lenamon expressed concern that “the death penalty lawyer who will be brought in will be rubber-stamping a preplanned defense.” He then went on to add that “whoever that [death penalty] lawyer is has to be independent of the strategy in evaluating the case.”
“I am hopeful they bring in some big-shot death penalty lawyer,” he said. “I will be the first one to say it’s the best move Mr. Baez has made since bringing me in.”
In the end Baez did just that, as another lawyer, Andrea Lyon, joined the case. Andrea was a capital death penalty attorney in Chicago and a true believer in the abolition of the death penalty. She was a clinical professor at DePaul University in Chicago, and was the director of the Center for Justice in Capital Cases there. We would later learn that the center had added funds to Casey’s defense pot.
From the start Lyon seemed quite capable; she is a big woman with a forceful presence. I remember one of my first conversations with her. Linda, Frank, and I were in the elevator and she told us that the defense wouldn’t be having any more of those unseemly press conferences that Jose was so fond of. I was briefly optimistic that perhaps things were changing. Then they quickly proceeded to hold a press conference, and then another, and many, many more. Lyon, like Baden, also had a book coming out, Angel of Death Row: My Life as a Death Penalty Defense Lawyer, coauthored with Alan Dershowitz. In January 2010, she told Today show host Meredith Vieira that Casey “didn’t kill her kid.” But Lyon declined to discuss any evidence she had seen to support her claim. I thought that Illinois had the same rule as Florida against making pretrial statements; oh well, I guess I was mistaken.
An Orlando defense attorney got in trouble with a local defense attorneys’ association for leaking a speech Lyon made at a death penalty conference, Life After Death, held in Orlando in 2008, where she made a very unflattering sexual reference to female prosecutors going home and putting on their “strap-ons.” We took it as a reference to a dildo—classy broad. The press had a field day, especially since the lead prosecutor in the Anthony case was a woman. Other statements Lyon made at that conference also created a stir, including her comments that judges are “ugly” and jurors are “killers.”
To familiarize herself with Lyon, Linda reviewed the entire speech. Within the speech Lyon made repeated reference to her preferred defense tactic, creating an alternative suspect. Linda was of the opinion that Lyon was behind the defense’s campaign to attack Roy Kronk, the utility worker who had found Caylee’s remains. Shortly after Lyon entered the case, Mortimer Smith, an investigator who worked for her center, was digging into Kronk’s past.
While Lyon was quite a charismatic adversary, the lawyer who, aside from Baez, would be there the longest arrived in March 2010. Cheney Mason was an Orlando lawyer touted in the press as having a stellar reputation. He