Imperfect Justice_ Prosecuting Casey Anthony - Jeff Ashton [96]
It was easy to see that the cornerstone of the Anthony family dysfunction was Casey. If one looks at the Anthony family dynamic without Casey, they were really quite normal. Both Cindy and George had steady employment, working for many years in their fields. They were both well liked at work, in their neighborhood, and in general. Nobody came forward with any horror stories about either one of them. When you listened to friends, family and coworkers, they were the picture of a loving and committed couple raising two children into young adulthood. Even Lee seemed a genuinely well-adjusted young man. Indeed it was Casey alone that appeared to be the anomaly.
It’s hard to say what it was about Casey that impacted everyone in the family so dramatically. My feeling is that Cindy’s very real, very serious issues with denial when it came to Casey infected the entire family. When George would attempt to explore Casey’s lies, Cindy would stymie him at every turn, telling him to “stop being a detective.” I felt that Cindy was scared of pushing Casey too far because she didn’t want her daughter to take Caylee out of her life. It was a misdirected love, and Cindy didn’t want to lose either of them—Casey was her daughter and Caylee was her light and joy.
As a parent, I can only imagine how difficult a situation it is to look in the mirror and entertain the possibility that your daughter killed your granddaughter. There’s no protocol for that . . . no guidebook for the correct emotional response. As irrational as the responses of Cindy and George were, I always tried to remind myself that I was not in their shoes. Still, it was hard to fathom the lengths they seemed to be going to in order to disrupt the conversation. As an attorney on the other side, it was hard to watch them fight us like this. If Cindy and George were lying to us, they were laughably incompetent at it; they’d had a lot more practice lying to themselves.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
BEHIND THE DEFENSE
The chaos brought on by finding Caylee’s body also spilled over to the defense team. The introduction of such vital evidence, along with our decision to make this a death penalty case, fundamentally changed the faces on the defense team. Yet through all the shifts on the defense, Jose Baez remained constant.
Linda, Frank, and I decided early that part of my role in the prosecution was to be the person to do battle with Jose. That way, Linda and Frank could try to maintain a working relationship with him and keep the channels of communication open. That’s not to say that Linda didn’t also have her fights with him, but I was his main adversary. As such, it won’t surprise you that I must begin this portion of the story with a disclaimer, an admission of bias: I genuinely dislike Jose Baez. He has a great deal of superficial charm that can easily be appealing at first glance. I am a big movie fan, I even like musicals, and there is a line from My Fair Lady that has always reminded me of Jose. It comes when Henry Higgins describes Zoltan Karpathy, a gentleman of his acquaintance, thusly: “Oozing charm from every pore / He oiled his way across the floor.”
It just seemed to fit.
There is an unearned air of arrogance about the man that is incredibly frustrating to witness. I say unearned because there are lawyers who either by accomplishment, reputation, or experience have earned the right to a bit of swagger. It’s not always pleasant to be around, but at least you know that swagger comes from having done something special or at least having the reputation for being capable of it. Those who claim the right to that arrogance without the accomplishments to back it up deserve to be exposed. When we looked behind the extravagant claims, we found Baez to be a man of rather pedestrian accomplishments, with precious little experience or knowledge to back up his swagger.
Like most people, I had never heard of Jose before this trial, but not long after I joined the case I’d poked around to get his background and learned that he was a thirty-nine-year-old criminal