Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [165]
We will never know if the jury followed the law in this case. We weren’t in the jury room with them. Judge Perry told them that George’s statement to River Cruz could not be used as evidence of how Caylee died. Did they follow that instruction and ignore that piece of evidence? Similarly, the Judge told them that what the attorneys say is not evidence, so they should have ignored most of the defense’s opening statement. Did they ignore the unsubstantiated idea that George had abused Casey? Absent some strong evidence to the contrary, I believe they followed the law.
Three of the jurors have given statements to the media, two anonymously and one by name. Having reviewed them all, I am pleased that it appears they did follow the court’s instructions. None of them seemed to give any thought to the unproven allegations of molestation or any of the other outlandish claims made by the defense in their opening statements. Along the same line, the defense’s repeated attempts to paint Casey as a victim ultimately fell on deaf ears, and no one seemed to believe Roy Kronk was seriously involved in anything beyond his discovery of the body.
Assuming they did follow the instructions, the question becomes one of reasonable doubt. We tell jurors that burden of proof is beyond a reasonable doubt, but defining that term is difficult. A reasonable doubt is not a speculative, imaginary, or forced doubt. We use concepts like “abiding conviction of guilt,” which ultimately means that the definition of “reasonable” is up to them. They must apply common sense, that knowledge of how people act by having lived in the world, to reach their own conclusion.
They presumably felt it was reasonable to believe that a mother would react to the accidental drowning of her young daughter by making no effort to revive her. They presumably felt it made sense that the mother’s next act would be to stuff her in a garbage bag and throw her in a swamp. If the jurors felt that those were “reasonable” reactions in keeping with what they knew about human behavior, then they had every right to feel that way and we have every right to disagree with them. I’d always said that if the jury saw the photograph of Caylee’s remains with duct tape over her nose and mouth and didn’t see in it what I did, then so be it. To me the duct tape was the one thing that could never be lied away, the one thing that said murder beyond a reasonable doubt, the one thing for which the defense had no explanation, and the one thing for which none of the jurors had any explanation in their post-trial interviews. Clearly, though, they disagreed, and we have no right to condemn them, no matter how angry the outcome may make us.
Throughout the weeks of the trial, I kept thinking that justice for Caylee would be sufficient to make the jury work harder and care enough to really think through what was reasonable. From the instant we showed the photo of Caylee’s remains with the duct tape and were met with no discernible emotion from the jury, I knew that it would be a struggle to make them care. Maybe there is something we could have done to make them care more or motivated them to think a bit harder about the evidence that we did have, but if there is I can’t think of it. We just couldn’t make them care more.
And perhaps that is the saddest part of all of this, that right up until the end so few people were willing to care about Caylee. Caylee got lost. I believe she was lost to Casey when she got in the way of the “Bella Vita.” She was lost to Cindy when Cindy chose to get behind Casey rather than lose her. And finally, I fear she