Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [152]
At the eleventh hour, however, it appeared that Cheney had decided he needed to step in. He had approached Linda about a plea. Linda told him that if Casey wanted to plead to second-degree murder for a specific sentence of thirty years, that she could do that. That she might be allowed to plead to the aggravated manslaughter charge, but she would have to give us an explanation to justify it. She would have to give us the truth about how it happened and it would have to fit. We weren’t going to let her plead down without knowing what happened to Caylee.
Cheney wanted Casey to talk to him about entering a plea. At first Jose was not on board with the idea, but he had come around and was at least entertaining it. On Saturday, June 25, we approached the bench and moved to a back room with Judge Perry. There, Cheney told us that Casey refused to even listen to the idea of a plea. Every time he approached the subject with her, she would look at him blankly, like she didn’t know what a plea was. He said her expression gave him concerns about her competency.
Whenever an attorney says there is a question of competency the law requires the court to take it seriously and explore the issue. Casey was being so stubborn that she would not even discuss the plea issue with Cheney. When he tried to broach it, she would not react or listen in any way. If he talked about it, she acted like he wasn’t there. Though we doubted there was truly a competency concern, we agreed that a competency examination was necessary.
My take was that Cheney felt they were losing the case and Casey needed to seriously start thinking about taking a plea. I think he was frustrated with her stubbornness. We agreed to tell the press that a legal matter had come up. Casey was ordered to speak with our old friend Dr. Jeffrey Danziger and another psychiatrist, Harry McClaren, who was from Chattahoochee, a small town up near Tallahassee.
The doctors both agreed that Casey was fine and competent to stand trial. They also said that she told them that she was not interested in a plea. It never came up again.
I have never had a “competency for stubbornness” issue before. People decompensate and get worse through the stress of a trial, but this was not a real competency issue. This was addressing stubbornness.
ROY KRONK WAS THE WITNESS everybody had been waiting for and the defense called him to the stand on June 28. Cheney Mason was going to be questioning the Orange County meter reader, who we hadn’t called because of his credibility issues. But he was an important witness for the defense, because they were trying to make him a scapegoat. Kronk repeated his story of seeing something suspicious at the scene where the body was found on the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth of August. The jury heard all three of his calls to 911. Kronk said that on the day of his final 911 call, he didn’t get any closer than twenty to thirty feet of the suspicious bundle.Mostly, the defense was curious about what kind of money Kronk felt he stood to make for the discovery of Caylee’s body. He said he was aware of the $50,000 reward. Cheney asked him if he had ever used the term “winning the lottery” about the body and if he had told someone he didn’t want his ex-wife to know about his reward. Kronk said that he had been joking when he made those remarks.
Because the defense was alleging that Kronk had taken the Anthony’s duct tape, on cross, we asked him if had ever met the Anthonys or had access to their house, car, or garage. Kronk said he didn’t know the family and did not have access to their home. Kronk’s estranged son, Brandon Sparks, was called to testify the following day. Sparks said his father had told him in November 2008 that he had found Caylee’s skull, and he was going to be rich and famous. But Kronk told jurors the conversation with his son had never happened.
George Anthony took the stand for a fifth time on June 30. Jose started right off the top, ripping into him about why he didn’t do anything