Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (46 page)

“The state can go into further detail with you during your depositions,” I said.

But Ashton intentionally didn’t take depositions of a lot of my experts that produced reports. I believe he did this so he could hold the judge to his order that stated, “If it’s not in the deposition and it’s not in the report, they aren’t testifying to it.” Throughout the trial, he kept bringing up the fact that we were in violation of his order because there were no depositions, even though it was Ashton who had failed to take their depositions, not me. I had taken the depositions of every single one of the state’s experts.

Many judges never would have put up with that. They would have said to Ashton, “You’re asking me to make the defense do all of your work. I’m holding you in contempt for wasting this court’s time and for being lazy and underhanded.”

But that lifeline never came. Ashton would keep pushing that envelope until he pushed me nearly to my breaking point.

CHAPTER 21

PREPARING FOR TRIAL

T
HROUGHOUT THIS CASE I always felt the obligation to do what I could to remove Casey from the shadow of the death penalty. I never felt this was a death penalty case, even before I heard the truth about what really happened to Caylee. Having to go to trial with your client’s life on the line is a huge and awesome responsibility, so I constantly focused on the goal of getting the death penalty removed. It was a big concern, to say the least.

Around the time I was considering calling the two shrinks who examined Casey to the stand, or at least listing them as witnesses, I came up with an idea that I thought might get Casey out from under the death penalty shadow.

I knew if we listed the psychiatrists as witnesses that the prosecution was going to take its depositions and ultimately know what our defense was going to be anyway. So I offered Linda Drane Burdick a deal: if she would consider taking the death penalty off the table, I would let her know in advance our defense strategy, and she could hear it from Casey herself.

Another reason to make the offer was that if the prosecution agreed, then there wasn’t going to be a death-qualified jury. A death-qualified jury is generally more conviction-prone because if she were found guilty, they would be able to proscribe the death penalty.

The prosecution had no clue what our defense was going to be and was desperate to hear it. This was the perfect opportunity for it to find out. The deal made sense. We’d get something, and the prosecution would get something. At first Burdick seemed eager to do it, but she faced strong opposition from Jeff Ashton. As I said earlier, Ashton strongly opposed taking the death penalty off the table. The reason for it, I’m convinced, was that he was in charge of the death penalty part of the case. If the death penalty were taken off the table, he would have had a much smaller role in the trial.

So at the end of two weeks of negotiations, the prosecution came back to me and said, “We won’t take the death penalty off the table, but if you tell us what your strategy is, we’ll consider it.”

Ashton was asking me to trust him, and even though he thought otherwise, I wasn’t that naive or stupid.

We said thanks but no thanks.

A
S WE STARTED ACCUMULATING
all the evidence that backed Casey’s version of events, there was a real possibility that we were going to have Casey testify at trial. We knew she would still take it on the chin for her numerous lies and we knew putting a client on the stand is always a risky move. And even though we were constantly looking for ways to admit evidence about her in without having to call her to the stand, I also knew we’d call her if we had to.

As I noted earlier, one way to get the information about Casey’s abuse into the record was to put the psychiatrists on the stand and let them testify. We had to submit reports from each of our experts. However, we were concerned that one shrink’s report might not be submitted in time because we added him to the witness list later than the others.

We had a closed-door meeting with Perry. I was in chambers with Ashton and Ann Finnell, my death penalty expert. This was a last-minute meeting; Burdick, Frank George, and Cheney Mason had already gone home for the day, so we called Ashton in to discuss the issue in front of Perry.

Ann told the judge the report of one of the psychiatrists might be a couple of days late. She said she didn’t want there to be any misunderstandings.

“Not a problem,” said the judge.

And then Ashton asked, “So what is the doctor going to testify to?”

Ann didn’t say anything for a few seconds.

Ashton said, “Just tell us. We’re going to find out tomorrow anyway when we take his deposition.”

“She’s going to testify that the child died by accident, and her father covered it up,” Ann said.

That was the first time the state had learned what our defense was going to be. And I’ll never forget Ashton’s bizarre reaction: he started to jump up and down in his seat like a little child. He burst out laughing, sounding like a hyena, and kept on jumping up and down in his chair as he laughed. We were talking about the death of a child here.

Ann and I looked at each other, and we looked at Perry, who had a deadly serious expression, and then the three of us looked directly at Ashton as he engaged in his celebration dance in his chair.

“Is that all?” asked Perry after Ashton finally calmed down.

“Yes, that’s everything,” we said, as we watched Ashton run out the door to pass on the exciting news to Burdick.

I turned to Ann and I said, “So what do you make of that reaction?”

“I think he’s mentally disturbed,” she said. “And I mean that in all seriousness.”

A
FTER THE PROSECUTION
took the depositions of the two psychiatrists, both sides agreed they should be sealed because they contained medical information as it related to Casey’s mental health, and because there were issues of sexual abuse by George and Lee, which was protected under state law. Perry immediately sealed them, saying that he wanted to review them before deciding whether they should remain sealed.

A couple of days later Cindy called me to say she and George had an appointment the next day at the state attorney general’s office to discuss the depositions of the shrinks.

I lost it. I smelled the skullduggery of Ashton and immediately contacted Perry, telling him that the state was planning to meet with the Anthonys to discuss the information that he had sealed.

Perry had a clear response: “Sealed means sealed.” Despite this clear message from the judge, the prosecution went ahead and had its meeting anyway. That was the arrogance of Ashton, whose attitude was, “I can do anything I want because I can get away with it.”

And get away with it he did.

To me the prosecution’s actions should have subjected it to a contempt citation. The prosecution argued that it didn’t show the Anthonys the depositions, but rather told the Anthonys’ lawyer the information from the notes prosecutors took during the depositions. The clear purpose was for the lawyer to pass the information to the Anthonys, which he did. The benefit to the prosecution by making sure the Anthonys found out what was in the shrinks’ depositions, of course, was that when the Anthonys found out that Casey was revealing George’s sexual abuse, they would turn on Casey, no longer support her, and became state-friendly witnesses.

I thought Cheney was going to have a heart attack. “This is the clearest case of witness tampering that I have ever seen,” he said. Cheney always would say, “These prosecutors always feel they have to have the advantage. They can’t play on a level playing field. Nothing makes them angrier than playing on a level playing field.”

He was absolutely right, and I heard that expression constantly in this case because they would abuse the system time after time.

How do you get away with that?
I asked myself.

When we told the judge what the prosecution had done, Perry said he’d reserve his ruling, but instead he put it on the back burner and never did rule, not even after the trial. Once again, Ashton was allowed to get away with—dare I say it—murder.

With the trial coming up, I began to think of the strategy for our defense. I envisioned a five-prong attack on the state’s “evidence.”

The first prong was what I called “good mother” defense. One of the strongest and biggest advantages we had was that, as much as the cops went through Casey’s life with a fine-toothed comb, speaking to anyone and everyone who knew her and Caylee, there wasn’t a soul who could give a single incident that Casey had been anything but a loving mother. To me this was huge because it bolstered Casey’s testimony that Caylee’s death was an accident and contradicted the prosecution’s theory that Casey had deliberately killed her daughter.

I’ve said this before, but in cases of real child abuse that leads to death, you almost always see a progression of abuse. You see a bruise, a black eye, or a visit to the hospital with a broken arm. The child will be malnourished and often neglected. There are always numerous documented incidents as the abuse progresses, until the actual death of the child.

That was
never
the case here. Caylee always was well taken care of and loved, and you could see it throughout her home. I can’t tell you how many people testified about what a wonderful mother Casey was.

I really wanted to ram this home because it not only bolstered the accident theory but also counterbalanced all the outrageous behavior Casey was accused of exhibiting during the thirty days she was away from home after Caylee died.

The second prong was going to be all about George and “Baldy.” We were going to go into the sexual abuse of his daughter and all the other things we discovered about George: his lies about the gas cans and the duct tape, his affair, his proclivity for making statements that pointed the finger at Casey, and his lies to law enforcement. I felt we had a very strong case against him.

Ashton, after his underhanded trick to inform George and Cindy what Casey was going to say against him, was sure George would turn on her and be a star witness for the prosecution.

But that didn’t entirely explain Ashton’s giddiness. Here’s one reason he was so giddy: because George was his witness, Ashton would take a larger role in the trial.

The other reason he was giddy was that he was sure George was going to make a great witness. George had always been a media darling, and Ashton was sure that because George had experience as a law enforcement officer, he would come across well on the stand. But I knew George a lot better than Ashton did. I had spent nearly three years with the Anthonys in their home. I didn’t think George would come across as credible on the stand and I was sure I’d eat him for lunch.

Ashton thought he was gaining a strong ally through his machinations, but he would be sadly mistaken come trial time.

The third prong was the information about Suburban Drive. Caylee’s body had been discovered on August 11 and then found again on December 11. What’s important to know is that when her body was found on December 11, she was found only nineteen feet from the road. Her remains were not found deep in the woods, as it was often described. As far as I was concerned, nineteen feet was by the side of the road. I intended to explain that and show how many people had been in that area between August 11 and December 11, with no one finding her body. It was incredible how many people had searched that area in the months before she was discovered and had not found anything.