Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (62 page)

Ashton spent several hours cross-examining him. He knew that Huntington was hurting his position badly, and he fought vigorously to attack him, cutting off his answers, bullying him, trying to control and manhandle him; in the end he failed because he didn’t have the evidence on his side.

One of the most bizarre things Ashton did during the trial arose during his fencing with Dr. Huntington, who during his testimony was discussing pigs decomposing. Ashton thought it would be cute to talk about “wrapping pigs in a blanket.” We were talking about the remains of a little girl, and he was cracking bad jokes.

Because Ashton was using an exhibit to question Huntington, I got to stand near the jury when Ashton made his “pigs in a blanket” quip. I looked over at the jurors. They didn’t like it, and none of us thought it was funny.

I kept objecting to Ashton cutting off Dr. Huntington during his cross-examination. Ashton said, “Discovery issue. I’m just very concerned that we’re going into other areas.”

His real concern was that Huntington was turning his case into hamburger meat.

Judge Perry said to Ashton, “Don’t do that again.”

Ashton kept interrupting Dr. Huntington, until I couldn’t stand it any longer.

“I’m going to object and ask that the witness be allowed to complete his answer,” I said.

Ashton apologized. He saw how angry Judge Perry was.

“I thought he was done,” said Ashton.

“I’ve lost my train of thought,” said Dr. Huntington. “I don’t remember where I was going with that.”

Ashton asked if he would like the court reporter to read it back.

Judge Perry called a sidebar.

“You need to talk to your counsel,” he said to Linda Drane Burdick about Ashton. “Because of what I’m about to do. If he continues to interrupt witnesses, and that goes the same for you, Mr. Baez, then I will prohibit counsel from participating. The only thing they can do is pass questions back and forth and so if you can’t control your counsel, that counsel will be eliminated from actual participation.”

“It’s a simple rule. Ask a question. And when they finish answering the question, they’ll stop talking. So if folks can’t control their emotions, I’m going to control them. And that’s one way I will do it.”

In all of the bragging that I have seen Ashton do about his performance during the trial, I have never heard him tell anyone about the day Judge Perry nearly threw him off the case for not being able to control himself.

After that Ashton, his wrists slapped, calmed down considerably.

On June 18, I called Dr. William Rodriguez to the stand. I was calling him because he had a great deal of experience dealing with bodies and duct tape, and he was going to testify that unless the remains are buried, duct tape never stays near the remains. His conclusion was going to be that the crime scene had been staged, and any evidence surrounding it should not be considered.

He was also going to testify that the superimposition of the duct tape over the color photograph of Caylee’s remains was “unheard of.”

“There’s no way scientifically that you can show where that duct tape was,” he said.

Ergo, the state’s cause of death: death by duct tape, was absurd.

But the jury would never hear his testimony. Ashton immediately objected because Rodriguez was an expert who hadn’t been deposed, and under Judge Perry’s order, if my witness had not included his opinions in his report or deposition, he couldn’t testify.

But wait a minute: it was Ashton’s responsibility to depose him. There was no way I could force Ashton to do that, and he purposely didn’t depose this witness, just so he could object and try to keep him from testifying.

It was ridiculous on its face. And Judge Perry let him get away with it.

Judge Perry called for a recess at 1:00
P.M.
so the prosecution could take Rodriguez’s deposition.

But there was a hitch. Rodriguez worked for the United States Armed Forces, and somehow, some way, according to Ashton, Rodriguez’s boss called Ashton’s cell phone to tell him that Rodriguez hadn’t gotten permission to testify. Ashton said if Rodriguez testified, he would be fired.

Ashton swore he hadn’t called Rodriguez’s boss, that his boss had called him. I have no evidence to say he was lying, but tell me, how did Rodriquez’s boss get Ashton’s cell number?

At first Rodriguez said he would testify anyway, but to make sure he didn’t, Ashton made a motion to hold Rodriguez over for another day so he could review his deposition in order to be able to prepare for his testimony, knowing full well what Rodriguez’s situation was.

For Ashton it was all about winning. Nothing else.

I told Rodriguez what Ashton had told me, that his boss said he was going to get fired if he testified, and under the pressure, we both agreed it wasn’t worth his losing his job. At the end of the day I had to strike him from the witness list.

M
Y NEXT WITNESS
was Dr. Werner Spitz, who was nothing short of brilliant. You’d be hard-pressed to find a forensic pathologist with more experience.

He testified that the autopsy conducted by Dr. Garavaglia was “shoddy,” and he talked about the fact that the skull had not been opened during the autopsy and that he had opened it. What he found was that there was important evidence that the body had decomposition on her left side, where she had been left. But when the body was discovered by Kronk, the skull was sitting upright. This was more scientific evidence that the crime scene had been staged.

Ashton crossed-examined him. During his cross he tried to use an article written by lawyers to impeach his testimony. Ashton wanted Spitz to see it, and when he did, he exclaimed, “You know, this is written by lawyers for lawyers, and as I say, by lawyers. It’s written in legalese. I don’t understand it. I am not a lawyer. I have never been a lawyer. It’s in lawyerese, and I don’t know how to understand this.”

Spitz was a riot on the stand, slapping Ashton around. He was also very persuasive. He was giving his direct testimony about decomposition in Caylee’s skull to Cheney Mason, who was asking the questions. There was a moment when he said, “You see black flecks. These black flecks are material which represent the large and permanent result of decomposition. What that means is that the brain, which fills this entire space, is gone. The brain has dissolved but some parts, like iron, magnesium phosphate, sodium, chloride, all kinds of elements remain permanent. They don’t disappear.”

“This is ashes to ashes and dust to dust, what you read in the Bible. And this is the dust which is remaining. And this amount of dust would have been probably just less than an ounce, but of course there’s not one ounce because some of the dust has been removed—has gone.”

His “ashes to ashes, dust to dust” analogy was very interesting, and I looked over at the jurors, and each and every one of them was leaning forward listening to the professor, the dean of forensic pathology, teaching them about what he had found and how significant it was.

He was telling them that he had found the residue—the black flecks—on the top left-hand side of Caylee’s skull to show she had initially been placed sideways.

The jurors saw that this was proof the crime scene had been disturbed and wasn’t reliable. And when Spitz testified the duct tape had no DNA on it, they were convinced Caylee wasn’t murdered by duct tape. During his cross-examination Ashton kept trying to nail Spitz with facts of the case that had nothing to do with the science. It was interesting, because when she was on the witness stand, all Garavaglia wanted to talk about were the facts of the investigation, that Caylee had been missing thirty days, investigative facts like that, while Spitz concentrated only on the work he did, not the investigative facts.

And because he couldn’t recall any of the investigative facts, Ashton tried to paint him as a doddering old man who couldn’t remember anything.

After court that day, it was one of the those days when I watched a bit of the news coverage afterward. The so-called experts out there who think they know what it’s like to try a case were saying, “Ashton took him apart. Dr. Spitz is going to end his career on a low note because Ashton destroyed him. He looks like a senile old man.”

Meanwhile, what these people didn’t know because of their ignorance, what they didn’t see from my seat in the courtroom, was that the jury hung on Spitz’s every word. They liked him so much because of his personality that they were much more open to listening to what he had to say. And what he had to say was devastating to the prosecution’s case.

After the trial one of the jurors confided in me, “After Dr. Spitz testified, the case was over for the prosecution.”

Our next witness was Jane Bock, our forensic botanist specializing in plant ecology, plant anatomy, and forensic botany. Jane is an elderly woman, who Ashton ridiculed left and right. She was discussing bones being buried and foraging by animals. When Ashton asked about a buried bone, she commented that a dog could have buried it.

He mocked her. “A dog buried? A dog buried?”

“They do,” said Bock. “As do coyotes. I don’t know if you have those here.”

“We don’t have coyotes …” Ashton said with contempt, when in fact there was a news article about coyotes being spotted in downtown Orlando.

You could argue whether her testimony hurt us or helped us, but the real impact of her testimony came from Ashton going overboard and treating this very kind, nice elderly woman badly.

“What a cocky asshole,” one of the jurors said to me after the trial referring to the way Ashton treated Bock.

Then came Richard Eikelenboom, whom I flew in all the way from the Netherlands. He was another witness whom Ashton deliberately did not depose. And this time Ashton’s tactics—with Judge Perry’s wrath–almost pushed me to quit the case.

Ashton intentionally did not take the deposition of a lot of my experts that we gave him the reports for. I believe he did this so he could hold the judge to his order that said, “If it’s not in the deposition and it’s not in the report, they are not testifying to it.” So throughout the trial, he kept bringing up the fact we were in violation of this order because
he
failed to take their deposition. You’d think there was something I could do about this, but there really wasn’t. If I could have forced Ashton to depose my witnesses, I would have.

Ashton, meanwhile, was gaining a great deal of pleasure at my distress.

He kept saying, “Baez can’t seem to follow that order, Your Honor.” When in actuality, it was Ashton taking advantage of two things: one, the order, and two, the fact that Perry was playing along with the game.

I badly wanted to make a motion to recuse Judge Perry, accusing him of bias, but I feared making it, as I told Casey, because of what he could have done to me.

At any rate, after I put Richard Eikelenboom on the stand, and Ashton made a big show of his opinions being outside the scope of his report, Judge Perry read me the riot act.

Judge Perry ruled that my actions were not inadvertent, but willful. Eikelenboom should have been required to comply.

How was I supposed to force Ashton to depose him, Your Honor?
I wanted to shout.

He refused to allow the witness to testify on the issue dealing with the possibility of DNA analysis on the decompositional fluid in the trunk of the car.

He also stated that he was going to consider holding me in contempt after the trial.

That shook me up, but good. What was he going to do to me? I didn’t know. I had never been held in contempt before. He could have fined me. There could have been ramifications with the bar, something I certainly didn’t want to go through. I could even go to jail.

And what of the public humiliation? I had worked hard to gain a good reputation as a lawyer, one who fights hard for his clients. I didn’t care if the media bashed me because it was in the course of defending my client, but this was different. We had recessed for the day, and I went to see Casey.

“I have to confess something to you, Casey,” I said to her. “I don’t know if I can defend you anymore. The problem now is that I have to worry about myself more than about you. I’m worried for my family, for my son. It would be unfair for me to be your lawyer because you’re no longer my main focus, and you deserve better than that.”

Casey began to cry.

“Please don’t give up on me,” she begged.

“I’m not,” I said. “But I just can’t believe I’m telling you this.”

I left her, went up to the bathroom, and I literally got on my knees and prayed for help and strength.

Cheney, meanwhile, went and spoke to Judge Perry. I walked in on them as Cheney was saying, “This kid is very concerned about his license and his career, and he’s no longer focused on this case. We can’t have this. This has got to stop.”

Cheney suggested that we quit for the day and all go home to start anew tomorrow.

“Everyone go home,” said Judge Perry. “I am not holding anyone in contempt.”

I went back and spoke to Casey.

“We’re breaking for the day,” I told her, “Everything’s going to be okay.”

It was a very difficult time for me in the middle of this very difficult trial. The next day the
Orlando Sentinel
ran a cartoon of Judge Perry bending me over his knee spanking me. I am a lawyer, a father, and a husband. All I was doing was upholding my oath as an officer of the court. No lawyer should be spoken to or humiliated that way. I say this not for myself, because what’s done is done, but for all of my brothers and sisters who fight for the poor, the underclass, and the underprivileged, as well as those who work for the private and endowed. But to those individuals responsible for this fiasco I offer them Plato’s wisdom:
It is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice.