Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [3]
In my thirty years as a prosecutor, I’d taken seventy homicide cases to trial; all but two had returned guilty verdicts. I’d also prosecuted twelve capital murder cases and won convictions in all of them. My record was solid, but it was only one of the reasons Linda asked me to lunch that day. In many of those convictions, the innovative use of forensic evidence was where I’d distinguished myself. I had renowned expertise in scientific evidence, and Linda thought my perspective and experience might be helpful.
As a prosecutor, I’ve always been interested in exploring how new scientific techniques could be used to convict guilty suspects. In 1987 I successfully prosecuted the first case in the world in which DNA evidence was used. A man by the name of Tommy Lee Andrews had climbed through a window and attacked a woman, slashing her with a box cutter and raping her repeatedly. Andrews left a fingerprint on the window screen where he’d entered the house, but since it was on the outside of the screen it was hard to connect it to the crime. To positively ID the attacker, DNA was collected from both semen in the rape kit and a sample of Andrews’s blood, and it matched. The jury accepted the new science and found him guilty, and the judge sentenced him to prison. It was the kind of forensic evidence that was truly novel in a criminal case, and that perspective was precisely what Linda needed.
For weeks before our lunch, Linda had been hinting about my joining the prosecution team. I had mentored her since she’d joined the office in 1989. We had worked together on many cases in the past, including a cold case murder of a little girl that was solved by DNA. Linda was tough and intense, with a big heart. I called her the marshmallow hand grenade. Frank George, a ten-year veteran of the office, was already on board with her, but as this shaped up to be a homicide, Linda wanted me on the team, too. I was still the go-to man in forensics, and because the case against Casey Anthony was developing with only circumstantial evidence, forensics were going to be of critical importance.
The forensics at the forefront that day in August had to do with a nasty odor and a nine-inch hair, both of which had been found in the trunk of Casey’s parents’ Pontiac Sunfire, the car Casey had been driving the last time she was seen with Caylee. A cadaver dog had alerted on the area and reacted strongly when the trunk had been opened. Despite Casey’s early story that Caylee had been kidnapped, it was beginning to look a lot like a homicide.
Linda told me about the work of Dr. Arpad Vass, a forensic anthropologist who was doing cutting-edge research in decomposition odor analysis. Dr. Vass had examined some of the evidence from the trunk, and Linda wanted me to call him to discuss his findings and see if his science could be admissible. Linda was hoping to bring me into this case, and morsels of forensics like this surely piqued my interest.
I was thrilled to be on Linda’s short list, but before either of us could begin to plan anything, office politics had to be negotiated. In 2002 I’d been made a supervisor, leading the juvenile division of the State Attorney’s Office. The assignment was supposed to have been a promotion, but I’d hated it. I missed trial work, and the following year I asked to return to the felony trial branch. Even though I had founded the homicide division in 1990, I was no longer a member of that department and could not move back. Instead, I was now tucked away in the trial division, even though I had twenty-eight years of service, an unblemished record, and a near-perfect conviction rate. After some difficulties with my supervisors, I’d earned an unwarranted reprimand and been informed I was not a team player. I became an overpaid desk ornament, doing trials I was way overqualified for.
Part of the problem was that there were two distinct camps in our office: those who wanted every case that came across our desks to go to trial and those who wanted to be more discriminating. Those who thought that whoever