Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [4]
Maybe I was too abrasive in my conviction and rubbed those on the other side the wrong way. For whatever reason, my successful record as a prosecutor seemed to have been overshadowed by my beliefs. The political players in the office clearly wanted me buried, and so I was. Nevertheless, the 120 trial lawyers on staff still held me in the highest regard, and most important, one of those was Linda Drane Burdick.
FROM THE TIME I WAS eight years old, I’d had the makings of a lawyer. When I was in fourth grade my grandmother and my great-aunt Thelma were visiting us in Saint Petersburg. After a spirited discussion on some topic, Thelma said to me, “You should be a lawyer.”
“I think I’d like that,” I responded. There weren’t many cowboys in Florida, and my friends had already cornered the careers of firemen and cops.
I am a Florida boy, born and raised in the great Sunshine State. I was delivered to Barbara and Richard Ashton on October 3, 1957, in Saint Petersburg, a west coast town on a peninsula between Tampa Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. At the time, Saint Pete was a retirement mecca for Midwesterners, so my family didn’t quite fit the mold. Mom was an active homemaker, and Dad was working as a CPA. My parents had met at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, ten miles north of Dayton, where my mother had an office job and my father was a lieutenant in the air force.
I grew up in a neighborhood of typical middle-class homes, in a modest three-bedroom ranch on a small lake, with my three sisters: Cindy, the oldest by twenty-one months; Judy, three years younger than I; and Barb, another three years behind her. I was an underachiever in school, but got through the public school system reasonably well. I don’t think I would have been classified as a nerd, but I was on the nerd cusp—not good at sports and a member of the drama club. Oddly enough, while in the drama club, I performed in a play with Angela Bassett—that’s right, the actress. She was a year behind me at Boca Ciega High School, and a very sweet girl. If that wasn’t accomplishment enough, I also captained our High-Q team, which participated in a local TV quiz bowl. Thirty-two teams competed in single-elimination matches over the school year. We won that year—Go, Pirates! Okay, maybe I was a full-on nerd.
In 1975 I graduated from high school in the respectable upper middle of my class and enrolled at Saint Petersburg Junior College. I started studying philosophy and logic and found it intriguing. I even made some money tutoring in those subjects. For my junior year, I transferred to the University of Florida in Gainesville and graduated with a B.A. in Philosophy in 1978. My father, the accountant, was always nagging me to take business classes, but I wouldn’t hear of it. I didn’t like numbers. I liked rational argument and thoughtful discourse. I wanted to be an intellectual. As it turned out, I was the only one in my family who did not go into some aspect of accounting.
I finished my undergraduate degree in three years, going to school summers and taking tests for college credit without classes. I didn’t know I was allowed to have fun in college. My father never told me that he had been anything less than studious when he was an undergraduate. It was only later, too late for me to follow in his footsteps, that I found out he had quite enjoyed the college life, drank his share, and played poker for spending money. I don’t know why I was in such a rush to complete school, but I kept