Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [135]
After George was dismissed, the jury had two questions of its own for Judge Perry. They wanted to know which twelve of the fifteen jurors would deliberate the case and which three were alternates. Would it be the first twelve and the alternates were the last three, or would the order be mixed up? The other question was, Did the alternates get to go home when the jury deliberated? Day Three of the trial and they were already talking about wanting to go home—not a good sign.
That night, they started sending out requests for DVDs that they wanted to watch. Some of them were kids’ movies, which was kind of weird. Judge Perry pointed out that they had already agreed on a list of movies, two hundred in all, but there apparently were some additional ones that they wanted. As I look back on it, I understand that the jury was sequestered and it was a long trial, but they were a rather high-maintenance bunch. There seemed to be a lot of thought and discussion about what entertainment they wanted, which movies they wanted to watch, and which restaurants they wanted to go to. Yet, as we would learn later, when it came time to deliberate, they never asked a single question about the evidence.
There was another mentionable high-maintenance incident when one of the jurors ran out of water during testimony. He looked at the court deputy, held up his empty water bottle, and shook it, like the court deputy was his personal butler and should fetch him a new one. The court deputy was annoyed at being treated like a servant.
Throughout the trial, Judge Perry was very accommodating of the jury, really wanting to keep them happy, satisfied, and reasonably entertained. They wanted to watch the finals of the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey game on television, so Judge Perry was going to get somebody from the cable company to acquire a tape of the game for them to watch. In the end, the local cable company hooked them up so they could watch the game live and on national television. Judge Perry gave the company a nice nod for their kindness. When the jurors wanted pretzels in the break room, he provided them. He spent a lot of time on their comfort. I now wonder if the judge made it too comfortable for them.
WHEN THE TRIAL RESUMED, FRANK called more “friends of Casey” to the stand. One of them was her ex-boyfriend Ricardo Morales. Frank asked him general questions about the Anthony family and the relationship between Casey and Caylee. He said he had last seen the toddler on June 10, the day he and Casey broke up. During the cross, I thought Baez behaved inappropriately toward Morales, drilling him about selling a photo he had taken of Caylee wearing the pink “Big Trouble Comes in Small Packages” shirt and others of Caylee to a magazine. He acted all indignant that this man would sell photographs of this poor dead child for $4,000. It was so hypocritical, when Jose had brokered the sale of photos of Caylee for $200,000 on Casey’s behalf. You wonder, how does he live with that?
Ricardo’s friend Troy Brown, Troy’s ex-girlfriend Melissa England, and four friends of Casey’s—Iassen Donov, Dante Salati, Christopher Stutz, and Matthew Crisp—followed Ricardo Morales. All of them testified to Casey’s lies. On cross-examination, Jose did manage to get the majority of them to say that Casey was a good mother.
In retrospect, I think the sheer quantity of lies might have taken away some of the impact of the individual lies. Almost like in aversion therapy, exposing someone to something that bothers him enough makes it seem not quite as bad. After about a dozen of these witnesses, I thought it got little boring to keep going over