Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [156]
When Casey continues to spin multiple tales to explain the child’s disappearance, even in the face of questioning by law enforcement officers, and maintains the lie even in the face of arrest, doesn’t your common sense tell you that what she is hiding is her own guilt?
When you find the remains of a little girl in a wooded swamp surrounded by items that tie back to one house, common sense says the child was killed by someone at the house who didn’t want the body found.
Most important, when you find the skull of a two-and-a-half-year-old girl with three pieces of duct tape wrapped from one side of the jaw to the other, covering where the nose and mouth would have been, what does your common sense tell you?
While plotting out my remarks, it also didn’t escape me that this was the last time I’d be standing before a jury for the State of Florida. My thirtieth anniversary with the State Attorney’s Office had come and gone six months earlier. Had I chosen to sit quietly for the last couple of years, I would have been relaxing at home with my kids. Instead, I’d decided to try one last time to bring justice, to see Caylee’s trial through to the end.
Regardless of the outcome, I never second-guessed my choice to be a part of this prosecution team. The last three years had encompassed everything that I’d loved about being a lawyer, as well as a few things that I hated about it, too. Win or lose, I was ending on a high note. But I sure as hell wanted to win. I believed our case was strong. I was ready to help prove that once and for all.
ON JULY 3, 2011, I arrived at court ready to deliver my closing argument in State of Florida v. Casey Anthony. We had finished thirty-three days of testimony, two days longer than Caylee had been missing. In all, 141 people had taken the stand, some more than once. Cindy Anthony alone had testified eight times.
As I arrived, the cameras were staked out at Camp Casey and Little Camp Casey. News trucks filled the street. My final day in front of the jury would be anything but quiet, but that was how I wanted it. From the first day I’d signed on, I’d known what I was getting myself into.
When it came time to deliver my remarks, I felt calm. I don’t normally write my remarks out beforehand, but since I would be talking about the thirty-one days, something I was not as conversant in as Linda, I’d spent a good deal of time organizing my thoughts. I knew how I wanted everything to be structured and made myself a road map.
I began by emphasizing the pattern of lies Casey had demonstrated when her baby was missing. One of the things I really wanted the jury to take away was that everything Casey had done had been deliberate. These were not delusions she was suffering from. These were lies for manipulation and gain, lies designed to disrupt and deceive.
In keeping with that idea of deliberate behavior, I returned to the idea of Casey’s MySpace password, which she’d revised to “Timer55” in the days following Caylee’s disappearance. Now, that could mean any number of things, it’s true. But in many ways, the new password was just too coincidental for me to stomach. The “55” number has such a precise significance, the number of days between Caylee’s disappearance on June 16 and her third birthday on August 9. The word “Timer” reminds her that the clock is ticking whenever she logs into her account. The end was drawing near, and she needed to have a solution to the problem that she couldn’t produce Caylee. Playing off this idea of how Casey found new solutions to her lies, I brought up the “end of the hall” concept and how in each of her lies she’d reached a point where she could go no further, a point past which the truth behind the lie was inescapable, when she was officially at the end of the hall. This was the point she would reach when “Timer55” expired on Caylee’s birthday, August 9. Before then she needed to have a plan, an out—specifically, one that would allow her to get away