Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [163]
Simply put, I think Jose Baez won in spite of himself. Time and time again, I saw how his lack of procedural knowledge hampered his ability to effectively represent his client. His defense was disjointed, his presentation questionable. Even now, after reviewing three years’ worth of motions, depositions, and witnesses, the defense’s strategy is nearly impossible to discern. Throwing everything out there and seeing what sticks has never been a viable defense strategy, in my mind. To say it was all smoke and mirrors implies there was some grand illusion that the defense worked the whole time. I think that gives them too much credit.
In many ways I think the defense came to mirror the client they represented. Just as Casey reacted when she reached the end of the hall, Baez took each leg of the defense as far as he could, and when he finally ran out of options, he just grabbed on to the next available thing—whether that thing was Zanny, Roy Kronk, or George Anthony. Standing back from it all, it’s very hard to find any aspect of their case credible when so much of it was dependent on Casey, the world’s least reliable narrator.
Of course, if Baez’s defense didn’t lead to the verdict, then what did? In the months since the verdict was handed down, I’ve asked myself that question about once an hour. There are no easy answers, but in hindsight, my belief is that the evidence as well as the makeup of the jury played large roles in how this decision was shaped.
First, to the evidence. As I’ve said before, you can only try a case with the evidence and the facts that you get from investigators, and in this case, despite the exhaustive efforts of the investigators and our experts, the evidence we had was entirely circumstantial. Now, plenty of murder cases gain convictions with purely circumstantial evidence; however, the caveat when trying a murder case with circumstantial evidence is that you need the jury to be willing to do a lot of work.
Furthermore, we’d always known that there were a couple of spots in the evidence that were problematic for us. Chief among them was not having a cause of death, but also we on the prosecution team could never effectively say exactly how Casey went from a search for chloroform in March to killing Caylee in June. We had our theories, of course, but there was never anything that we could say definitively and prove in court. Similarly, another barrier was that Casey, according to all the testimonies of her friends and family, had been a loving mother. If this were true, how did she become a cold-blooded killer?
Of course, there was no way for us to suddenly come up with a cause of death or prove that the events between March and June led to Casey killing her daughter, but the claim of Casey being a loving mother was an area where a more complete and candid testimony from Cindy could have been really beneficial. As Cindy’s coworkers had shown in our interviews with them, Cindy had her doubts about Casey as a mother. Because these interviews were based in hearsay and therefore inadmissible, Cindy alone had the power to show this to the jury. If Cindy had chosen Caylee over Casey, we might have been able to use Cindy’s testimony to make a stronger case for Casey as an irresponsible parent with more of a motive for murdering her daughter.
However, even with those shortcomings, we had an incredibly strong case. I’d always felt (and still do) that the presence of the duct tape showed clearly that this was first-degree murder. Couple that with Casey’s pattern of lies, her total lack of emotional response to the “accidental” death of her child, the smell in the trunk, Caylee’s hair, and the cadaver dog’s reactions, and I feel this demonstrates an undeniable level of guilt on Casey’s part.
While I believe that the evidence proves Casey is guilty of first-degree murder, it is possible