Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [2]
“As to Count One, murder in the first degree, we find the defendant not guilty,” she said.
I was stunned, numb, like the feeling a millisecond after an automobile accident when intellectually you know something just happened, but emotionally it’s too surreal to comprehend. When I heard “not guilty” on the second count, aggravated child abuse, I knew it was over. Count Three, aggravated manslaughter, was going to be “not guilty” as well. If the jury didn’t believe Casey had committed even child abuse, they were not going to find her guilty of anything.
Wow.
I could feel myself mouthing the word of disbelief, physically moving my lips and saying it, but not out loud. I stifled the urge to shake my head, even though that was what my body wanted to do. I did not want to demonstrate either approval or disapproval to the jury. To me, one of the most sacred rules of attorney decorum and respect is that you never demonstrate approval or disapproval of a jury’s verdict.
If there were gasps in the courtroom, I didn’t hear them. I don’t even remember hearing the guilty verdicts on the misdemeanor counts. I am not even sure if I heard the “not guilty” verdict on Count Three. Linda, Frank, and I all just sat there. I knew that Linda would be an absolute iceberg. She was the consummate professional and kept her emotions to herself. I was completely in my own head.
I knew what was happening, but I don’t remember processing it. It might be egotistical, but it never occurred to me that all twelve of those jurors, in that amount of time, could have rejected all that evidence. It had always been in our minds that they could find Casey guilty of second-degree murder or manslaughter, but a complete “not guilty”? That was shocking.
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
JOINING THE TEAM
The Daily News Café in Orlando is your typical lunch spot. Bustling, people shouting orders, good sandwiches—no matter the day, no matter the season, the counter is always packed and the food is always exactly what you need. Located on Magnolia Avenue just a block and a half from the courthouse, the Daily News has long been a staple for Orlando’s lawyers, and so perhaps it was fitting that my good friend and colleague at the State Attorney’s Office Linda Drane Burdick brought me there one hot day in August 2008 to talk about the case that currently had the entire legal community abuzz: the disappearance of a two-year-old girl named Caylee Marie Anthony.
The Daily News Café was always crowded at lunchtime, so Linda and I ordered at the counter and went to find a table, where we began to talk about the details discovered to date. She was the chief of the sex crimes/child abuse unit, and as such, the Caylee Anthony case had been in her lap since the beginning. I, like everybody else in Orange County, Florida, had been following the story in the newspaper, and I knew the broad strokes, but there was a lot going on behind the scenes that I was unaware of.
Linda had been contacted about the case on July 16, 2008, as a result of the child’s grandmother calling 911 to report Caylee missing. When the call came in, Caylee hadn’t been seen in thirty-one days. The child’s mother, Casey Anthony, told investigators that she had been working at Universal Studios, a local theme park, and Caylee had been staying with various friends and nannies, in particular a twenty-five-year-old woman named Zenaida Fernandez Gonzalez. According to Casey, she had dropped Caylee with the nanny on her way to work, but when she came back to get her, both of them were gone and the phone had been disconnected. She didn’t report her daughter missing, but claimed that she had been searching for her ever since. However, nothing Casey had told the police since the 911 call had proved true. As if the lies weren’t bad enough, there was forensic evidence from Casey’s car that pointed not only to foul play, but to