Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [106]
As their Texas EquuSearch witnesses fell apart one by one, the three of us on the prosecution knew that this version of Casey’s lie was dying its inevitable death. In the two and a half years we’d been on this case, we’d seen this all before, whether it was during the role-play with Lee when Casey had first developed the kidnapping story and Casey 2.0 was born, or at Universal Studios, when she’d reached the end of the hall, or when she’d created the Blanchard Park variation of the kidnapping story, Casey 3.0, for Lee. She had nowhere else to go with the mysterious abductor story, so she needed a new narrative. We’d seen it before so many times, we could almost smell it. All the telltale signs were there that Casey’s story was about to change. It had to. But the nuclear lie that was about to be dropped was beyond even our wildest imaginations.
With the Frye hearing finally over, Linda, Frank, and I had submitted the state’s list of witnesses and the defense had submitted theirs. All motions about discovery had been resolved. There was nothing left for either side to do but plan for the logistics of the trial itself.
Yet one complication remained. During the Frye hearing, we’d received a new witness list from the defense with two new names: Dr. Jeffrey Danziger, a psychiatrist from Orlando, and Dr. William Weitz, a psychologist from the Fort Lauderdale area. I had known Dr. Danziger for many years. He was a forensic psychiatrist, and part of his practice was forensic evaluations. He was one of the two doctors who had originally examined Casey in July 2008 by order of Judge Strickland, who had asked both doctors to do a basic competency evaluation. At that time, the only significant finding had been that she was unusually happy for somebody in her circumstances.
Baez had not filed anything about the content of what these two mental health experts were going to testify to, so all signs pointed to another Baez ambush. At the end of the Frye hearing, we raised the issue with Judge Perry: the court had previously ordered that all experts had to provide reports, so we were expecting reports from Danziger and Weitz.
For the defense, Ann Finnell said she was going to contact these doctors and have them submit reports by that Friday, April 8. We had only four weeks till trial, so even Friday was pushing it. We needed to decide if we were going to depose them, but we didn’t know what they were going to say.
That afternoon I was running out of the courtroom to pick up my children from day care. Linda and Frank had already gone home. When I got outside the courthouse, I remembered that my wife was on pickup duty so I slowed my pace. My cell phone rang just as I reached the parking garage. Ann Finnell was asking me to come back upstairs to the courtroom. I walked in to find Finnell, Mason, and Baez standing in the courtroom.
Ann told me she had contacted the two doctors and there was no way they could get their reports to her by Friday. She wanted to go before Judge Perry to explain the delay and she needed a member of the prosecution team in court. We called the judge and he reentered the now empty courtroom, without a court reporter, to see what was up.
We all stood in the courtroom near the jury box as Ann explained the issue with the report. I didn’t have a problem with a slight delay, but time was of the essence.
“What is this about?” Judge Perry demanded. “Why don’t you just tell? Why do we have all this mystery?”
All of us, including Judge Perry, went together into the back jury room. We took