Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [131]
The prosecution team hoped that by hearing about the progression and tweaking of her lies, the discovery of Caylee’s body, and the connection of that crime scene with the Anthonys’ home, the jurors could interpret the defense’s opening, filled with unsupportable allegations, as just another of Casey’s lies. But of course that would require some intellectual effort and some actual thought on the part of the jurors.
The jury is instructed that what the attorneys say is not evidence. Their job is to express some skepticism toward both sides and say, “Okay, now prove it.” We knew we could prove Linda’s claims in opening, and we knew Baez couldn’t prove most of his. We could only hope the jury would do its job.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE BIG SHOW
Planning the order in which we would call the witnesses was the part of the case preparation I really enjoyed. The order can be complex, especially in a case of this magnitude. Sometimes it is driven by consideration of legal requirements for the admission of evidence. You have to connect a piece of evidence to the case before the jury can see it. Sometimes that may require testimony from multiple witnesses. You may have to call a few cops who had casual contact with a suspect before you can get to the one who took the confession. Sometimes decisions are driven by what your choices allow the other side to do. A delay in presenting a certain part of a witness’s testimony, or leaving it out entirely, may affect the ability of the other side to effectively contradict him. You must consider the emotional impact the testimony will have and how it will affect the jury’s view of what comes next. Lastly, there is the attention span of the jurors to consider; you can’t expect them to stay awake through too much complex testimony back-to-back.
In total we were planning on calling approximately seventy witnesses. Of those, ten or so were going to be particularly important, including George and Cindy, Dr. Vass, and our medical examiner, Dr. G. The key pieces of evidence would be the findings of smell and chloroform in the trunk, the testimony of the cadaver dog’s handler, and the hair from the trunk.
Linda, Frank, and I set up a dry-erase board in one of the offices and started mapping out our witness chart. Linda is a fan of color-coding. I would often tease her about her affinity for colored-dot stickers on everything. She marked Frank’s witnesses in red, my witnesses in blue, and her witnesses in green. This way, we would know at a glance which witness was assigned to whom. The order of the witnesses was largely mine to plan, with tweaks from Frank and Linda. I think I just enjoyed this stuff more than they did, so they deferred to me. My plan was to play the case out in a mostly chronological order. We’d start with George and the events of June 16. From there, we’d move into the thirty-one days through testimony from the friends of Casey, plugging George, Cindy, and Lee in for those portions of testimony where they belonged. After that, we’d look at the Pontiac—how it was towed, George’s discovery of the smell, and retrieving the car. The plan was that this would involve the jury in the mystery, leaving them wondering for days of testimony, What the hell happened to Caylee?
That led us naturally into all the events of July 15, the day Caylee’s disappearance was confirmed. We’d tap Cindy and Casey’s behavior, the involvement of the police, Yuri Melich’s entrance as lead investigator, the Universal wild-goose chase, and then the arrest. The jury should be ready for something a little drier now, so we would then move to the forensics of the car, the dog alerts, the odor evidence, the hair evidence, and tying the chloroform to the searches on the computer. This evidence would give the jury a peek at the answer they’d been seeking for a week: What happened to Caylee?
After all that, we’d give their intellects a rest and hit them emotionally with the calls Casey made to her family from jail and the jail visitation videos, showing