Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [103]
We spent the next year getting ready for that date. It was all the grunt work that goes into getting ready for a trial and sorting through what needs to be done. It’s a process that I like, but there’s always stress involved. Most of our hearing time was occupied by common death penalty motions that get filed in capital cases. The defense usually files a couple of dozen motions, all of which are routinely denied.
One thing we noticed was that with Judge Perry at the helm the hearings tended to be shorter and involved much less posturing by the defense. I recall with great affection the first time Judge Perry interrupted Baez and politely insisted that he stick to the topic at hand. In that one statement, it was instantly clear that Judge Perry was not going to let Baez get away with the stuff he’d been pulling with Judge Strickland. Not long after, Baez and Mason attempted to get Judge Perry to rehear several issues that Judge Strickland had already ruled on. Judge Perry simply looked at them and maintained all the rulings. Much to our satisfaction, Judge Perry also reaffirmed the discovery and motions deadlines that Judge Strickland had set, meaning that our May 2011 trial was going to take place on schedule come hell or high water.
Not surprisingly, the defense team’s out-of-court shenanigans didn’t stop with the introduction of Judge Perry to the case. Ever since Casey had been indicted by the grand jury, the pretrial preparations had been a constant roller coaster of Jose’s noncompliance. Deadlines would be set, then ignored. If and when they were finally met, there was little or no acknowledgement of the fact that they had been met late. It was a frustrating cycle for all of us on the prosecution, and it didn’t bode well for the run-up to the trial.
Of all the ways that the defense made the pretrial phase harder, perhaps the most glaring was that they did not have much respect for the rules of discovery. When it came to evidence, Baez had a reputation as an ambusher. Prosecutors who’d had cases with him in the past said they had been ambushed with last-minute evidence. In a case in Lake County, he had been reprimanded by the judge for this behavior. Mason, on the other hand, was a reasonably straight shooter, so our hope was that they would balance each other out.
When it came to the discovery phase, our first major issue with compliance started innocently enough. By November 2010, Jose had given us a list of several expert witnesses, but he had said nothing about what the subject of their testimony would be. Because the rules of discovery require both sides to turn over the reports of experts, defense attorneys generally tell their experts not to prepare reports so that there is nothing they are required to turn over. But even though the prosecution doesn’t have the actual reports, we typically are given an idea of what the experts are going to say. In this case, however, Jose gave us nothing to go on.
In an attempt to get something to use to prepare for the depositions of the experts he had listed, I filed a motion requesting a number of different documents I suspected the defense might have—letters, e-mails, contracts—that would help explain the purpose of calling the various experts. At the hearing on the motion, Judge Perry denied most of what I was asking for but added something I hadn’t asked for. He told Baez to file a document by a certain deadline that would give some general information about the background and expertise of the experts. He also added that Baez needed to provide a statement of the “subject matter” of their testimony. A rather modest order, I thought, but helpful nonetheless.
The deadline came and went with no filing. Once the deadline passed, I called Baez about it and he claimed he had forgotten. The next day his filing arrived. It contained some minimal information about the experts,