Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [127]
The trial started right on time, with the Honorable Judge Belvin Perry presiding. We promptly went into the opening arguments. As we had planned, Linda started off by saying that it was time to tell the story of a little girl named Caylee. We had previously discussed a way to get the jury thinking about Caylee whenever they thought about the case. It was our hope to bring the jury back to the toddler by humanizing her, to get them to see her as someone they would ultimately care about. They had already been sitting in the courtroom for two weeks during jury selection, and all they had seen was Casey, Casey, and more Casey. Throughout the case’s history, Caylee had largely been a footnote. But she was a real person, a little girl, and hopefully, she would take center stage long enough to make an impact and capture some hearts. Knowing Caylee would help the jury truly understand the case.
We came up with what I thought was a great plan. Linda would show the jury the last photo of Caylee when she was alive, taken on Father’s Day during the visit to her great-grandfather at the nursing home where he lived. She would then display the photo of her remains as they were found off Suburban Drive, a photo that no one in the public had seen before, and describe it as the last photo ever taken of Caylee Anthony. She would say that the story of this case was what happened between those two photographs.
Linda delivered it perfectly. I looked at the jury and expected to see from them in the same shock I had felt the first time I had seen the photo. But, I saw nothing in their faces. They were unmoved. How was this possible? I thought to myself. How could anyone look at that and be unmoved? I shrugged it off. Maybe the jurors were just good at hiding their emotions.
Our plan was to lay out the rest of the case chronologically, as Linda had suggested, giving the jury the story of that six months between when Caylee died and when she was discovered. Linda did a great job of reviewing the history of the crime and very methodically telling the jury about the pattern of lying that Casey had demonstrated. Linda showed how Casey twisted her stories to accommodate new challenges whenever they arose. Our goal was not only to put our case out there, but to convince the jury from the start that Casey’s lying was not merely habitual, it was purposeful. Linda went day by day showing how Casey built her fabrications, laying out each and every one consistently. Their minute, complex details would change only when they reached a dead end, but at that point, Casey would still try to morph and adapt them again to give them the longest life possible. We knew the nuclear lie was coming from the defense in this trial. We wanted the jury to expect it, and we wanted to drill home that the “big one” was going to be just the next step. We couldn’t tell them that they were about to hear a big lie, but we could hope we had prepared them well enough to see it that way.
At one point in the opening I began to think to myself, we need to skip over some of this stuff. A moment later, Linda seemed to sense the same thing, so we left out some of the details in the early July period. We wanted our opening to be full impact, all the way. We didn’t want to lose anyone’s undivided attention. We had originally planned to mention the tattoo,