Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [147]
Judge Perry’s admonitions to Baez about these repeated violations of procedure seemed to fall on deaf ears. These incidents were going to test even Judge Perry’s patience, and he was a very patient man.
Huntington described an experiment he had performed just for the Anthony case. He took the carcass of a pig, put it in the trunk of a car, and let it decompose over time. He showed the jury pictures of the rotting pig and all the flies at various stages of decomposition. As he was making his presentation, Linda leaned over and whispered, “He didn’t put his pigs in a blanket.” We both laughed, and Linda dared me to actually say that during cross-examination.
So, when I was crossing Huntington, I said, “Well your experiment didn’t mimic the conditions under which Caylee’s body was wrapped. You didn’t put your pigs in a blanket, did you?”
I immediately told the jury that someone dared me to say that. I’m not sure if the defense team was as amused as we were, but Huntington gave a little chuckle.
Huntington was the first witness to argue the idea that the garbage found in the trunk made the smell in the car. He was standing by his opinion that the flies were the result of trash in the trunk. On cross, I challenged him to show me where there was actual food in the garbage. I asked him if he had actually seen the evidence with regard to the trash and he said no, just a photo. First, I produced the picture in which he had claimed to see fly-producing garbage.
He pointed to this one Oscar Mayer salami container. “See? There is meat inside that container, and if it rotted, that could create the smell,” Huntington said.
We had the garbage in evidence. Our forensics people had taken the trash, dried it out, and put each piece in its own bag. I found the evidence bag that had the salami wrapper, handed it to Mr. Huntington, and said, “Show me the piece of meat in that package.”
“Oh no, it was paper,” he said. What he had thought was meat in the picture was actually paper. That was the first step in the debunking of the smell in the trunk as garbage.
Dr. Werner Spitz was a forensic anthropologist who was over the age of eighty. Back in the eighties and early nineties, he was one of the leaders in his field. Over the last ten years or so, he had inserted himself into a number of high-profile cases; O.J. was one, Phil Spector was another. Now he had involved himself in this case. I felt he was desperately searching for a way to maintain some relevance in his field.
His testimony was twofold. First, Dr. Spitz attacked Dr. Garavaglia for having not opened Caylee’s skull at autopsy. She had left it intact. That was a violation of basic autopsy protocol, he continued. Second, he was the only witness trying to render the opinion the skull had been removed from the crime scene. He testified that someone could have removed it, taken it home, put duct tape on it, and returned it to the scene.
When Dr. Spitz had performed his own autopsy, he had opened the skull and found some residue, which he claimed to be able to recognize from sight as the decomposition of the brain. To him, the residue indicated that the skull had been on its side when the brains decomposed. I called this the “brain dust” testimony.
On cross, I started with his criticism of Dr. Garavaglia’s autopsy, about the violation of protocol claim, that Dr. G had not opened the skull. Dr. Spitz had been one of the authors of a basic textbook on forensic anthropology. I took his book up to the stand, put it down in front of him, and said, “Show me where you say it is protocol to open a skull when it is skeletonized.”
He leafed through the pages and did not find any reference to his claim. I next asked him if he was familiar with any other written protocol on the opening of the skull at autopsy. And he answered no. Next, I addressed the “removal and return of the skull” theory. I went through what I thought would be necessary to carry out what he was alleging. Someone would have to take the skull and the mandible home, put them in an anatomically correct position,