Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [76]
Throughout the case, the defense had been floating different theories about what had happened to Caylee. Kronk’s inconsistencies gave them a totally new narrative to grab hold of. Suddenly Kronk might have had something to do with Caylee’s death. Suddenly Kronk could have planted the body in the swamp in the fall of 2008, after Casey had been arrested. Suddenly the defense had a whole new argument to obscure things with.
Between Kronk’s disingenuous behavior and his exaggerations, the skeptics had a field day. At every turn, Kronk was vilified and had to defend himself. However, as bad as he got it from the media, the pundits, and the bloggers, nothing was as bad as the blindsiding he endured at the hands of Jose Baez.
It wouldn’t happen until nearly a year later because it took until November 2009 for the defense to set Kronk up for deposition. On November 19, 2009, Kronk appeared in our office accompanied by David Evans, a local attorney representing him. David had originally been hired for Kronk by the county because of all the media attention, but he stayed on pro bono. During the meeting, Kronk was deposed at length by Jose Baez, who inquired in very general terms about Kronk’s past years in the Coast Guard, his marriage back in the 1990s, and his son by that relationship. The process continued until 4:30 P.M., when the defense team abruptly called it a day, saying they’d pick it up again later that week, date to be determined.
None of us thought anything of it, but when the deposition was over, Baez quickly walked over to the clerk’s office and filed a motion in limine, which is a generic motion that asks for a pretrial ruling on the admissibility of certain evidence. He attached affidavits from Kronk’s ex-wife and every woman he’d supposedly ever wronged, statements filled with nasty stuff about him—he was a terrible person; he was a liar; fifteen years before he had supposedly used duct tape to restrain a girlfriend after a fight. The filing even went so far as to quote his ex-wife’s statement that Kronk’s sister wouldn’t let him be alone with her daughter, implying some suspicion on the sister’s part.
Their intent was to file the documents moments before the court closed but in time for the media to get their hands on them for the five o’clock news. This was classic Baez, filing motions without telling the prosecution just in time for the evening news and making headlines out of irrelevant matters. We were convinced that the only reason he had filed this was to publicly discredit Kronk, to get people talking and thinking that he was shady enough to at least take a second look at.
I didn’t learn of the scurrilous remarks about Kronk until the next morning when I opened the newspaper and read them. I had even been at the deposition and it was news to me. The defense was giving information to the media I believed that they knew would never be admitted at trial, but they were using the court to promote their media agenda. It was one of the most disgusting abuses of the court system I had ever seen.
Not one word of it had anything to do with the case. I may have had my own concerns about Kronk’s credibility, but the guy didn’t deserve that—nobody did. Support for my belief that their intention was merely to throw mud came more than a year later when the defense waived its right to a hearing on the admissibility of the nasty hearsay evidence. They didn’t even try to defend the evidence once its media relevance had passed, and of course the judge excluded it.
In the end, we wouldn’t call Kronk in the case—not because of his past, but because of his words and his alleged “character” issues. That he embellished his story on December 11 was very frustrating for us, so we decided not to use him as a prosecution witness. We did not want to be vouching for his credibility when we didn’t believe him ourselves. It would have hurt