Anthony trial: Lack of evidence or good defense?

KYLE HIGHTOWER, TAMARA LUSH

Asso­ci­ated Press

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — Pros­e­cu­tors proved Casey Anthony was a liar, but con­vinced the jury of lit­tle else.

The gov­ern­ment failed to estab­lish how 2-year-old Caylee Anthony died and they couldn’t find her mother’s DNA on the duct tape they said was used to suf­fo­cate her. There was con­flict­ing tes­ti­mony on whether the putrid smell inside the family’s car was a decom­pos­ing body or sim­ply trash, and it was never quite clear why chlo­ro­form was so important.

The lack of evi­dence and the doubt raised by the defense — that Caylee acci­den­tally drowned in the family’s pool — was enough to win an acquit­tal. After a trial of a month and a half, the jury took less than 11 hours to find Anthony not guilty of first-degree mur­der, aggra­vated manslaugh­ter and aggra­vated child abuse.

She was con­victed only of four mis­de­meanor counts of lying to inves­ti­ga­tors who were look­ing into the June 2008 dis­ap­pear­ance of Caylee. She lied about being employed at Uni­ver­sal Stu­dios. She lied about leav­ing Caylee with a baby-sitter, then again when she recounted to inves­ti­ga­tors that she had told two imag­i­nary peo­ple that Caylee was miss­ing. She also lied about receiv­ing a phone call from Caylee the day before she was reported missing.

Lead defense attor­ney Jose Baez was crit­i­cized by many legal pun­dits for his strat­egy and loosely throw­ing around alle­ga­tions of molesta­tion and incest. Baez sug­gested early on that Casey’s father, George Anthony, helped cover up the drown­ing and sex­u­ally abused his daugh­ter, accu­sa­tions the father vehe­mently denied. Baez also claimed Casey’s brother might be Caylee’s father and that a meter reader who dis­cov­ered the girl’s remains may have moved them, more alle­ga­tions that weren’t substantiated.

Ulti­mately, though, the bur­den of proof wasn’t on Baez.

“I don’t think it was Baez’ great lawyer­ing that won the case,” said Richard Rosen­baum, a Fort Laud­erdale crim­i­nal defense attor­ney who closely fol­lowed the trial but wasn’t involved in the case. “I think it goes back to the pros­e­cu­tion and the weak­nesses in their case.”

Kendall Cof­fey, a for­mer U.S. attor­ney for Miami and now a defense attor­ney, said Baez had to offer an alter­na­tive to the prosecution’s the­ory of how Caylee was killed, though he was less impressed with the molesta­tion accusations.

“The biggest ques­tions were the ‘how’ and the ‘why,’” Cof­fey said. “Even the state acknowl­edged they weren’t exactly sure of how Caylee was killed. That was a can­did acknowl­edge­ment, but Baez seized on that.”

Orlando’s chief pros­e­cu­tor said his attor­neys were dis­ap­pointed with the ver­dict but they pre­sented every piece of evi­dence that existed.

“This is a dry-bones case. Very, very dif­fi­cult to prove,” said Orange County State Attor­ney Law­son Lamar. “The delay in recov­er­ing lit­tle Caylee’s remains worked to our con­sid­er­able disadvantage.”

Shortly after Lamar’s news con­fer­ence, one of the lead pros­e­cu­tors on the case, Jeff Ash­ton, announced he would retire at the end of the week fol­low­ing 30 years as a pros­e­cu­tor. A spokes­woman for the prosecutor’s office said Ash­ton and Lamar had pre­vi­ously dis­cussed his retirement.

The six-month gap between when Casey was reported miss­ing and when her remains were found in Decem­ber 2008 affected the amount of sci­en­tific evi­dence inves­ti­ga­tors could glean from the pieces of bones, some as small as a peb­ble. And pros­e­cu­tors didn’t have any evi­dence that put Casey at the scene where the remains were found.

There was also con­fu­sion on why chlo­ro­form was so impor­tant. Chlo­ro­form is a chem­i­cal com­pound that can be used to knock some­one uncon­scious and also is found in human decom­po­si­tion, but pros­e­cu­tors never made clear exactly what its role it played in Caylee’s death.

Pros­e­cu­tors said Casey searched for the term “chlo­ro­form” on the family’s com­puter, though when her mother, Cindy, took the stand late in the trial, she said she searched for it. Later, job records indi­cated that Cindy might have been at work when the searches were made.

Then there was the smell test. After pros­e­cu­tors pre­sented an expert wit­ness who said that a car­pet stain taken from the family’s car trunk had a smell con­sis­tent with a decom­pos­ing body, the defense called the expert’s for­mer col­league who tes­ti­fied to the opposite.

Baez addressed his naysay­ers dur­ing a press conference.

“This case has brought on new chal­lenges for all of us. Chal­lenges in the crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, chal­lenges in the media, and I think we should all take this as an oppor­tu­nity to learn and to real­ize that you can­not con­vict some­one until they have had their day in court,” he said.

Yale Galanter, who has rep­re­sented O.J. Simp­son in a num­ber of cases since 2000, said he was not sur­prised by the verdict.

“The issue is there was absolutely no evi­dence link­ing her to the death. None,” said the Miami lawyer. “So what the defense did was bril­liant, they brought up the drown­ing, they brought up the sex­ual molesta­tion, and it really got the jury to focus away from the bad behav­ior of the mom.”

Posted by AP News on Jul 5 2011. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.