Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [164]
In the wake of the verdict, a frequent criticism has been that the state attorney should not have made this a capital case. Without the death penalty, the thinking goes, the jury would have almost certainly returned a “guilty” verdict, because they just couldn’t bring themselves to rob George and Cindy of their only daughter when they’d already lost their granddaughter. Of course, the obvious problem with this logic is that the jury would have been fully within its right to reject first-degree murder in favor of a lesser murder conviction that did not carry the death penalty. If they’d really felt she was guilty but did not want to award the death penalty, a lesser murder charge would have conveyed that point quite well. This verdict, however, was not the work of a jury that was concerned about the punishment; instead, this decision was the work of a jury who didn’t believe she deserved to be punished at all. To me the biggest legacy of this decision is not that Casey wasn’t convicted of first-degree murder, but that she got away scot-free.
Ultimately, it is this piece of the jury’s decision that I absolutely cannot understand: how could they disregard so much evidence showing that Casey had played a large role in Caylee’s death? Looking through the testimonies that we presented at trial, one thing that seems quite apparent is that, either through her own deliberate actions or through some kind of negligence, Casey was involved in her daughter’s death. There is simply too much evidence tying Caylee’s dead body to the car Casey was driving for me to believe that Casey herself was completely uninvolved.
Our case was not a slam dunk; we knew that from the start. It required work from us, it required work from the witnesses we’d called to present our evidence, and it required work, not to mention common sense, from the jury. From the moment our jury had been fielded back in May, we’d had concerns over their apparent absence of strong opinions as well as over the amount of effort they seemed willing to expend on this. In retrospect, I think those concerns were justified.
My worst fears from jury selection manifested themselves in the verdict. This jury needed someone to tell them exactly how Caylee died. Piecing it together from circumstantial evidence was not good enough for them. They wanted the answers on a silver platter, but we didn’t have the evidence to serve it that way. It’s not just the verdict that tells me this, but also the manner in which it was reached. The fact that they didn’t request any materials to review. The fact that they didn’t have any questions for the judge. If the statements that the foreman of the jury made to the media are true, ten of these twelve jurors felt that ninety minutes of deliberation was sufficient to fully weigh, consider, and reject four weeks’ worth of testimony that we on the prosecution used to establish that this was first-degree murder. The rest of the thirteen hours of deliberation had been spent trying to convince the two holdout jurors of the decision.
Juror Jennifer Ford, the only juror to identify herself, later said in an interview that “no one showed them how Caylee died.” My question would be: How hard in those ninety minutes did you look for it? The jurors had to put the pieces together and apply some common sense to the notion of how people do and don’t act. This jury was not willing to do that, so in a sense we lost before we started.
I AM FIRST AND FOREMOST a lawyer, and