Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [89]
Mitigation can also come from general factors in one’s background, such as childhood deprivations or abuse. These are common family histories put forth as mitigating circumstances, but Casey’s early interviews with the psychologists ruled those out. From all available evidence, not to mention Casey’s own words to that point, she appeared to have been raised in a loving middle-class home, experienced no abuse of any kind, and been given every opportunity in life that her parents could manage to supply. I am sure the defense would dispute this, they always do. But it appeared to us that there was no obvious mitigation. Once that analysis was complete, it was clear that the death penalty would have been lawful under a view of the evidence that the jury could reasonably have taken.
Aside from the legal issues, there are practical issues to consider as well. A case in which the death penalty is sought involves a substantial expenditure of public resources, so my feeling has always been that, as with any other prosecution decision, the cost must be weighed. Any lawyer must consider the cost to his client of pursuing a course of action versus the potential for success. I believe all public officials who have the power to spend the public’s money should take into account how much it is going to cost the taxpayers. However, it cannot be the driving force in any decision. Justice doesn’t have a price. The two must be balanced.
Casey Anthony’s case was a tough one for me to balance. On the one hand, the death penalty had been considered by juries in three cases that involved the murders of children by caretakers in my thirty years in the office. But all the defendants had been men, with prior criminal records. The jury voted for life in all three of those cases. The juries in our circuit have never given death to a caregiver who had killed a child. On the other hand, none of the caregiver defendants had planned and premeditated a murder, as we were intending to claim in the death of Caylee. While there had been other cases where mothers had planned and carried out the murders of their children, the mothers always presented pretty clear evidence of psychological and emotional problems, which were not present with Casey.
The most frustrating part of the analysis was that in reality, the issue that would most probably be in the minds of the jurors would be the very one they should not be considering: that Casey was an attractive, middle-class Caucasian girl. I believe you must always do a gut check in a decision of this kind and ask yourself, “Would my decision be different if the defendant were X and not Y?”
How would the jury view this if Casey were a father and not a mother? How about if she were African-American or Hispanic? What if she were poor or extremely wealthy? In the end, I concluded that under any circumstance, the death penalty could be lawfully sought in good faith. But based upon my experience, the odds of the jury actually voting to recommend it were exceedingly small. Ultimately, the decision of the state attorney was to go forward and let the jury decide. Since I was convinced we were on solid legal footing, and we were going forward in good faith, I was ready to proceed.
Ever since that decision was made and certainly in the aftermath of the trial, some second-guessers have claimed that Lawson should not have reintroduced the death penalty to the case, saying that its potential put a cloud over this case that might have impacted the outcome. To me, that position is more about people trying desperately to find something to say we