Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [134]
Understandably, Baez picked up on the discrepancy between whether there had been tape on the gas can during his cross-examination of George. He ended up asking the same question that I had asked during the deposition: “When the gas was returned, did it have duct tape on it?”
Rather than saying, “No, it didn’t,” and staying consistent with what he’d said to me only an hour or so before, George started to be difficult with Baez, answering his questions with questions for the sole purpose of frustrating him.
This was not helpful to our case. George must have hated Jose, particularly because of the latest allegations. I think George may have believed that it had been Baez’s idea to accuse him of molesting his daughter. In George’s mind, Casey had only submissively gone along with her lawyer’s plan. None of us on the prosecution saw it that way. To us, the molestation accusation had “Casey” written all over it. Regardless, one thing I was sure of was that Baez knew how much George disliked him and used it to his advantage. Baez probably wanted the jury to see George’s hostility, and George took the bait. He was not bright enough to read what was happening. I wanted to say, “George, just stop playing games, just answer the question,” but I couldn’t. I’ve always wondered if on some subconscious level George was trying to look guilty. Maybe this was his way of helping Casey. I didn’t really think so, but I wondered. For someone who was innocent, he had a way of making himself appear suspect. I didn’t think it would seriously hurt our case, or lend any real credence to the defense’s baseless accusations, but I knew this was not the face of George that we on the prosecution team wanted to project.
Baez knew that George would continue to try and dance around the connection between the tape and his house. By now, we also had a video in which the same duct tape was being used at the “Find Caylee” command center. This further made George look like he was lying. If initially he had been trying to protect Casey, now he was looking as though he was trying to protect himself, something not lost on Baez.
Ultimately, George said that the gas can didn’t have duct tape on it when Casey brought it back. So why the game? He was playing right into Baez’s hands. I just wanted to slap him, and this wasn’t even the end of it. The next thing I knew, George was arguing with Baez about how often he mowed his lawn.
“You cut your grass every week?” Baez asked.
“Well, every week, two weeks, ten days,” George answered instead of just simply saying, “Yeah, I cut my grass every week in the summer.” Baez then brought up George’s call to the police to report that his shed had been broken into, implying that his call was an attempt to set Casey up.
I could tell that George wanted to spar with Baez about anything. But not only was he not as practiced at the dance as Casey, he didn’t have a motivation to stop. Normally, a lawyer can appeal to a witness’s better judgment by saying, “You’re at risk of allowing the accused murderer to go free by the way you are acting.” But George didn’t have that motivation because the accused murderer was his daughter. Instead, he was exercising his private outrage at Baez, and ended up looking like he was trying to hide something. He was only shooting himself in the foot. All we could hope was that the jury would understand that George’s anger was justified, that it was directed at Jose, and it was not indicative of complicity.
As much as George wasn’t doing himself any favors, I thought some clear questions with concise answers could help dispel any doubts about George that surrounded him. On redirect, I tried to make the point that in June 2008, there was no way George could have known that the gas can or the tape on it had anything