Presumed Guilty: Casey Anthony: The Inside Story (68 page)

I thanked him, but at the end of the day when I look back, I did that as much to save my own hide as Ashton’s. I knew once he was done holding Ashton in contempt, he was going to do the same to me. I didn’t think for a second he would have disciplined just Ashton alone.

Some people say I won the case right then and there, or at least it was one reason the jury voted the way it did, but that’s nonsense. At the same time Ashton didn’t do himself any favors by acting that way.

As I said, he was always on our side.

I
NOTED THAT THE PROSECUTION
spared no expense hiring the finest crime labs in the country, but with all its resources, it had to create new areas of forensic science. I said that for the first time ever, a jury heard about air evidence. For the first time, they heard about hair banding, and they were the first to hear about a dog trainer testifying about his dog.

“You’re the first ones to ever hear any of these types of evidence,” I said. “That’s what I told you from the very beginning, that this prosecution would raise the level of desperation to make up for their lack of evidence.”

“I told you at the very beginning this was an accident that snowballed out of control, and while it was a very common accident, what made it unique is not what happened but who it happened to.”

I said the jurors sat and watched some bizarre things during the trial, “bizarre things that have been going on long before Caylee was ever born and throughout her early life. You saw all of these things.”

“There’s something wrong here. There’s something not right,” and I told the jury that was what made Casey’s behavior after Caylee’s death irrelevant. I reiterated: “It’s irrelevant to the number one question that you all came to answer: How did
Caylee
die?”

T
HE NEXT TOPIC
of my closing was to let the jury know that there was not one single strand of real evidence to the state’s case.

Since it was Casey’s car, one thing the prosecution did was try to show Casey had put Caylee’s body in her car, drove to the woods, and dumped her there. There’s only one problem with that theory: even though the prosecution rounded up a posse of scientists, and even though it made up theories in a desperate attempt to show there was a body decomposing in the car, there was no evidence of that.

The prosecutors brought up a stain of decomposition in the trunk, when no stains existed. They kept bringing up how the smell in the trunk reeked of decomposition, when at the end of the day all their scientists turned out to be full of it. The trunk smelled of garbage, not decomposition, it turned out.

They needed to tie the duct tape found near Caylee’s body to Casey, and so when a gas can was found with some of the same duct tape on it, they trumpeted that Casey had used the gas can, and therefore she had been the one to put the duct tape on Caylee. But it turned out there was no DNA on the duct tape found near Caylee and no fingerprints. The theory also turned out to be made up by the cops and the prosecution.

I asked the jury, “Why were there so many lies surrounding the gas cans and the duct tape? It’s not a coincidence.”

Then there was the sense that the police did everything they could to make sure the finger was never pointed at George.

When George went to pick up Casey’s car at the lot, he not only brought his keys, but he also brought a full can of gas, because Casey had told him the car had run out of gas. He told the tow lot manager that the car had been at the Amscot lot for three days. How did George know that? Because Casey told him when it ran out of gas, and he knew. And he smelled the smell you never forget, and he did what every responsible parent would do when his daughter and granddaughter were missing.

Nothing.

He went home and went to work.

I talked about the great lengths the police went to to make sure Casey was convicted. A dog who was inconsistent at identifying the smell of dead bodies alerted to Casey’s car. The next day the dog came back and smelled—nothing. And not only that, when a dog did a test like that, he was supposed to choose among three different cars, but he only smelled one car. When asked about it, the dog handler testified that the dog had chosen between two cars, yet everyone else’s testimony impeached him. Why? Because even though there turned out to be no evidence that a body had ever been in that car, the cops wanted you to think there was.

Was there the smell of death in the car? George certainly pointed it out that first night, but then Catherine Sanchez, the manager of the Amscot, said she smelled garbage. Casey’s boyfriend, Tony, who rode in the car, didn’t smell anything. Charity Beasley, who picked up the car and took it to the tow yard, didn’t smell anything. Maria Kish also rode in the car and didn’t smell anything. Sergeant Reginald Hosey smelled something. Did he call the crime scene investigators? No. There was trash in the car for three weeks.

Deputy Ryan Eberlin didn’t smell anything. Detective Yuri Melich? Didn’t smell anything. Corporal Rendon Fletcher? He walked right by the car while the trunk was open.

But once Casey was arrested, everyone smelled death in that car.

Is there reasonable doubt about the smell in the car?

I told the jurors to decide that for themselves.

Then there was the day Casey borrowed a shovel from her neighbor for forty minutes, and therefore the state’s conclusion was that she was burying Caylee in the backyard in broad daylight. What she was doing was trying to break the lock on the garage to find some gas for her car. But to the state, her borrowing that shovel was cause for it to trumpet she was digging a hole. But when she brought the shovel back, the neighbor testified, she wasn’t sweaty. When the shovel was inspected by the FBI, no DNA or any other evidence was found on it.

Is that reasonable?

What was the state doing here? They were speculating. That’s not the law, but that’s what they wanted the jury to do.

To win, I speculated that the police may have consciously altered and destroyed evidence. Take the trash. It was our alternate theory to their contention that the smell came from a dead body. How did they try to get rid of our contention? They dried the garbage so that it didn’t smell any more.

“How can this create a smell?” the prosecution asked.

Well, it sure smelled when it was garbage—before the police altered it so it wouldn’t smell.

I then talked about what I liked to call the state’s fantasy of forensics. If I have made a mark in trying this case, that expression will live forever in legal history. I didn’t use it to make a name for myself. I used it because it was true. The state’s case was a mixture of invented evidence and science fiction.

Early on, the cops leaked that there was blood in the trunk of Casey’s car. There was a stain from human decomposition. They said there were maggots in the car, and that was proof of human decomposition.

None of it was true, but all this “evidence” was spread through the media to trial fans throughout the country. The anger against Casey grew because she was a woman who killed her daughter in order to go out and party, a series of charges of which NONE WERE TRUE.

But here’s what the state hoped: if the jury was angry enough at Casey, if its emotions were riled up, if it stared hard enough and long enough, it just might see a stain in the back of that car.

That’s not evidence. Evidence would be a DNA report. It was a phantom stain. It’s there—you just can’t see it.

The state’s case was nothing but desperation.

Dr. Neal Haskell and Dr. Tim Huntington talked about the bugs in the trunk of the car. Or should I say bugs in the trash bag? The insect the state found is commonly found in garbage. Since the state had no DNA evidence or any blood, it instead gave us speculation: if the police found maggots, there must have been a dead body.

Anger and emotion: that’s what the state wanted to fill in the gaps with.

Why were there allegations that there was a body in the trunk?

It’s to make up for a lack of evidence. To keep the jury guessing. To have it take that leap of faith into a place where it should not and could not go under the law.

Next the prosecutors talked about the hair. Or rather
one
hair. And they said it had post-mortem root banding, proof that the one hair came from a dead Caylee, hence Caylee’s body was in the trunk of the car.

But it turned out that the science was unable to determine whether the hair came from a dead body or from a hair that was discolored from spending a long time in the trunk while it was being subjected to chemicals and heat.

One thing we did know: they were talking about
one hair.
They had taken hair from the trunk, hair from the trash bag, hair from her home—they went crazy trying to find more hairs so they could say the hair came from a dead body. And they found hundreds more hairs, but not one more with post-mortem root banding.

What are they doing here? Let’s throw it all against the wall and see what sticks, right down to the cause of death. One week it was chloroform. Later it’s duct tape. Let’s make up our minds.

Then we get to the chloroform. When I first heard chloroform mentioned in this case, I thought it was a joke. This issue came up because of Dr. Arpad Vass. He testified that the levels of chloroform were “shockingly high.” But all he performed was a qualitative analysis, not a quantitative one. He had no idea what the levels were. But what did he say? He said the levels were “unusually high.” And it was spread to the world by the media like a radioactive cloud from an atomic bomb. Casey had killed her daughter using chloroform.

And it turned out this guy was selling a machine which was supposed to be able to identify whether chemicals came from a dead body. Someone stood to make millions if only he could make it known how great his data was in this trial. The trouble was that the data was faulty, and as it turns out, there is no reliable chemical signature of human decomposition yet. It’s in its infancy stage, and some of his work is groundbreaking, but it doesn’t make it sound science. That doesn’t make it true.

The prosecution was pushing the boundaries of science. That’s what Vass was doing here. When I questioned Dr. Marcus Wise, his collegue, Wise said it was impossible to tell how much chloroform there had been in the trunk because a quantitative test was scientifically impossible. Meanwhile, another chemist said the main component found in the trunk of the car was gasoline.

Was the state giving jurors the truth when someone’s life hangs in the balance?

The jury had to look at the lack of evidence and wonder why some of these questions weren’t answered. I suggest that this lack of straightforwardness is unacceptable.

This is the level of absurdity, the desperation that the prosecutors will take it to. They asked the jurors to see things that weren’t there. They asked the jurors to imagine fictional science. It was a fantasy of forensics. That’s what it was. And nothing more.

We have the most advanced crime-fighting tools available to us anywhere in the world, and they couldn’t find a single link from Casey to Caylee’s death. Not a single link. But yet they wanted to create things? For what? The cameras? Because it was a high-profile case? No. Because it was all about winning. Winning at all costs. No matter how much it cost. No matter what it cost. No matter how much justice was perverted.

Then I took the jury to where I thought the evidence showed where this case reached its most outrageous level, and that is the computer searches. A report came in that someone—the state said it was Casey—had visited a chloroform site one time. But at trial the man who made the report, Sergeant Kevin Stenger, didn’t testify. Instead, John Bradley testified that he developed a new program that indicated that someone had visited a chloroform site eighty-four times.

“There were eighty-four searches for chloroform” was what was spread to the world via another atomic blast from the media via the police.

It was a jaw-dropping moment for me, and it turned out the second program was faulty. The reality was Casey had looked up chloroform once after Ricardo Morales had sent her a Myspace photo entitled “Win her over with Chloroform.” And it turned out she had spent exactly three minutes finding out what her boyfriend was referring to.