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State of Florida v. Anthony OCD

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In its first day of flailing about, lead defense counsel Jose Baez bored the jury with a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo about DNA, by way of his expert witnesses. His intent was to cast doubt on the state’s circumstantial case against Ms. Anthony by citing the absence of DNA and traces of blood in the Anthony’s Pontiac Sunfire and on various articles of clothing. The prosecution had little need to cross-examine witnesses, except to establish that the lack of blood and DNA did not preclude that a crime had not occurred as per the prosecution’s case.

There were a couple of moments that brought the jury back from their daydreams. Baez’s opening arguments had portended his reliance on the notion that Ms. Anthony had been sexually abused by her father, George, and her brother, Lee, which caused her to live in denial and become a psychopathic liar. During today’s testimony, Baez explored the possibility that Lee had been the actual father of Caylee Anthony. However, the DNA evidence examined by the expert witnesses called by the defense failed to corroborate that allegation.

Many legal experts and regular folks were expecting that Baez would deliver some fireworks today. His opening statement was so dramatically surprising with its drowning and cover-up story that it seemed obvious that he would begin the defense’s case by calling witnesses to support it and the sexual abuse scenario. He disappointed many who had jockeyed for position to get a seat in the courtroom. The boring DNA presentation was not the entertainment they were seeking.

If Baez continues his bumbling, he’ll lose the jury completely.

What about the OCD?

People are certainly addicted to these high-profile trials, but some of the non-addicted ones are still in the running for the Casey/ISAG incompetence award. One guy posted a self-righteous, “Oh, is that trial still going on? I refuse to watch it” comment in a Facebook thread about the trial. When the proprietress of the thread, a paralegal herself, said that it was actually quite interesting, the pious prick reiterated his position: he refused to watch it. So, I asked, “Why the hell did you bother to comment on it?” Guess he wanted to spread the word that he didn’t have the derangement syndrome like the rest of us, but posting there was a self-indictment if anything.

In Central Florida, essentially, a seven county area surrounding Orlando, it is almost impossible to escape the tentacles of the the “Casey Trial”. This brings back memories of the famous O.J. trial in Los Angeles. The audience is concentrated more locally, but both trials have provided a form of entertainment that mesmerizes people from all the social strata. All of the major local TV stations cover the trial live, with a remote-operated pool camera providing the video. Also, the TV stations are publishing a live video stream on their web sites, as is the local newsrag. CNN’s HLN channel is also providing live coverage. Media pseudo-wonks such as Geraldo Rivera, Nancy Grace, and Greta Van Susteren are camped out here, anxious to advance their theories so they can brag about how correct they were. The audience is steadily increasing, but here in Central Florida, it was here from the start. It drones on TVs, radios, and Internet connected computers virtually everywhere one goes.

A friend, knowing that I would be away most of the day tomorrow, reminded me to record the trial coverage for the day so I wouldn’t miss anything. I told her that I would be watching it on my Android phone, so there was no need to record it. She told me that she had an Android phone, too, and wanted to know how to do it. It is easy. Just open up one of the TV station’s websites in the built-in browser, and navigate to the live coverage. You’re in! My friend checked it out, found that it worked, and became excited over the prospect of not having to be separated from the action. “There goes your productivity!” I said.

Cheap entertainment for troubled times.

My informal polling of friends, associates, and strangers has concluded. Most people want to see Casey go down for the crime they’ve already convicted her of having committed. It is very hard to believe that a mother could have treated a child in such a manner, but they’re ready to conclude that Ms. Anthony is a lying psychopath, and they want to see her punished for it. However, even if the verdict goes their way, it might be a long time before they can he served their vindictive dish. Being a capital murder case, the appeals can go on and on.

One big question as Baez continues to bumble through his witnesses is whether Ms. Anthony will testify. This, of course, would be a dangerous ploy. Having admitted that she is “such a great liar”, she is likely to add perjury to her other major offenses, but the real danger is that she reveals the inconsistencies in the defense’s case under cross-examination. For that reason, it is doubtful that Baez will call her to the witness stand, unless he is truly desperate.

Because the State of Florida’s case is entirely circumstantial, it might fail to get a conviction for the original charge of first degree murder. A second degree or manslaughter conviction is a possibility. Those who would like to see Ms. Anthony get the lethal needle or rot away the rest of her life in a state penitentiary without parole will be sorely disappointed if she is convicted of a lesser charge. And if she is acquitted — oy! There could be riots. People are always looking for an excuse to riot these days to vent their frustration. Right, Vancouver?

Bottom line — it might be cheap and dirty entertainment, but around here, one can walk up to a stranger on the street and instantly have something to talk about. That’s remarkable in itself.

José, can you see?

I see Ms. Anthony sitting there in court and wonder if she sees the same Baez as we do. She hired him, putting her life in his hands. Is she not growing a bit concerned about his blundering naivete? Baez has been at the bar for a mere five years and has had only three years experience at criminal defense. The one murder case he defended wound up with a conviction. Baez brought together a team — a somewhat lesser team than the O.J. “dream team” — but he has not managed it well, as I’ve stated in previous posts. He obviously wants the limelight mainly to himself. That’s going to screw up the defense.

Cheney Mason sits there largely unused. The defense would have benefited by more of this experienced criminal defense attorney’s haughty cross-examination and less of Baez’s passionless questioning. Now, it seems that there are rumors of friction between Mason and Baez, especially over Baez’s insistence in laying out his case in great detail in his opening arguments, a blunder in Mason’s opinion. Mason’s frustration with Baez’s tactics can be seen in the following transcript excerpt from a sidebar conference dealing with allowing the jury to hear testimony from the prosecution about the fact that animals had chewed on bones of the decedent.

Defense attorney Cheney Mason: “Talking about animal chewing is not probative of any issue in this case … It’s scandalous or shocking and emotional, but it doesn’t prove anything. There’s no question that the child is dead, that these are her bones. But to start talking about animal chewing, I think is inflammatory and we object to it.”

Assistant State Attorney Jeff Ashton: “It is my understanding that the defense’s position is that these bones were moved, placed into this location at some later date. The fact that the bones were scattered by animals and chewed on is probative of the length of time that they had been present.”

Judge Perry: “Well, but for your argument and suggestion that somebody kept the bones and moved them about, I would sustain your objection. But in view of the fact that that’s your theory, that Mr. [Roy] Kronk took the bones and took them somewhere and kept them, it has relevancy in that standpoint.”

Soon after, the parties discussed what defense attorney Jose Baez said regarding Kronk during his opening statement. Mason reminds the others that Baez said “the bones were dragged and moved.”

Later he adds, “Does it prove that defense counsel made an opening statement decision that may have not been prudent? Perhaps.”

Perry said, “Before Mr. Baez made his statement, I told you I would…sustain the objection,” Perry said. “But when you talk about somebody moved and kept bones for the purpose of getting a reward, I mean … it’s a whole line of questioning that you’ve just opened a can of worms up on.”

Then Mason asked whether the Baez opening statement opened the door to all of this.

Perry responded by saying Baez had questioned a crime scene investigator and a deputy about this long after his opening statement.

At this point Baez says, “The gnawing of bones does not – does not give any indication as to how long remains would be there.”

But Perry ultimately said, “animal activity has to do something with the timeline in this case … it’s an issue that the defense raised.”

Blunder. Perry overruled the defense’s objection to showing the jury the evidence, which had to be disturbing.

Will there be changes on the dysfunctional dream team? At this late juncture, one has to doubt it, but for you and me this is only conversation fodder; for Ms. Anthony, it is her life.

The Prosecution Rests

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We are likely to see the end of the long line of witnesses for the prosecution in the murder trial of Casey Anthony today. Court will reconvene at 1:00 PM to accommodate two out-of-town prosecution witnesses who had scheduling issues. Barring surprise witnesses or recalls, this will end the prosecution’s case against Casey.

Will the prosecution team have proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Ms. Anthony is guilty as charged? All the elements of its case are circumstantial; no one has offered or can offer proof of exactly how Caylee Anthony actually died. The prosecution, however, posits that the little girl died in the trunk of Ms. Anthony’s car after having been chloroformed and having had duct tape wrapped around her nose and mouth. She either suffocated or succumbed to the chloroform. Witnesses from the Orange-Osceola Medical Examiner’s Office, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department Crime Unit, and the FBI presented and interpreted evidence that clearly suggested this manner of death, supported by expert witnesses, according to whom the body could have been in the car trunk for 3 — 5 days before being tossed into the swamp at the end of the street where the Anthonys lived. There, little Caylee’s bones were gnawed upon by animals and dispersed to surrounding locations. A gruesome animated film that superimposed the skull found in the woods over Caylee Anthony’s smiling face left a vivid impression on the jury while lead defense counsel Jose Baez cried “foul”, demanding a mistrial. Judge Perry denied that motion and the trial continued. The jury has probably seen enough to convince them, but if you’ve ever served on one, you know how fickle juries can be. One intransigent juror can cause seemingly interminable deliberations just to satisfy her.

How will the defense proceed to discredit the prosecution? Will Casey be called to the witness stand by the defense? Will Jose Baez, whose greenness has caused the defense to have shot itself in the foot several times thus far, rely upon his more experienced team members or will he continue to blunder his way to a conviction?

Recall that in Mr. Baez’s opening arguments he asserted that Caylee had suffered an accidental death by drowning, which Casey’s father George Anthony had witnessed. He said that Anthony had panicked and had driven the entire cover-up facilitated by his daughter’s penchant for lying convincingly. Casey, according to Baez, was raised in a hostile climate of abuse that made her a pathological liar; George Anthony was the primary abuser, having performed sex acts on his daughter through the years and told her to shut up about it. Defense counsel was quite graphic in his description of one particular act forced upon Casey, painting an image of a teenage girl being forced to perform a nearly daily act of fellatio on her father as one of her preparations to ready herself for school. Baez stuck his neck out with this theory and with his grandstanding, designed to imprint an indelible image on the jury. While the prosecution did not attack the theory directly except by asking George Anthony if he had, in fact, abused his daughter, which he denied, some of the recorded telephone conversations between George and Casey while she was in jail suggested that no abuse occurred, particularly when Casey declared that George had been the best father and grandfather through the years. For whatever reason,  Baez chose not to cross-examine George about his denial. This now puts the defense in a position to have to call him as a witness during the defense phase. However, now, the time for cross-examination has passed and the defense will be able to ask only antibiotics brand generic direct questions.

This brings up the most interesting potential stratagem by the defense: whether Casey Anthony herself will testify. As you undoubtedly know, an accused person can not be required to testify in his own defense. Nevertheless, because George has not admitted to having committed sexual abuses on Casey, it will be necessary, in this Turkey’s humble and non-legally qualified opinion. If Casey takes the stand, feel free to anticipate that perjury will be added to the collection of felonies that she has committed or is alleged to have committed. (She already has been convicted of five counts of forgery for stealing and using her friend’s checks.) Assuming that the abuse scenario concocted by the defense is folly, Ms. Anthony will have to conduct one of her finest dramatic performances to convince the jury that it is true. The jury knows about her penchant for lying convincingly, including her braggadocio: “I’m such a good liar.”; therefore, they can be expected to be skeptical about any representations Casey makes on the stand. Yet, since Baez’s opening arguments had made the abuse a cornerstone of Ms. Anthony’s defense, the jury will have to be convinced. I don’t think Baez can pull it off.

As for drowning being the cause of death (conveniently, because it would leave no signs on a decomposed body), the prosecution did not prove that it could not have happened that way. They merely advanced their own theory. Nevertheless, Dr. Jan Garavaglia, the Medical Examiner, cited statistics that made this an atypical drowning and a questionable cause of death. No drowning death had ever happened in Orange County without a call to the 9-1-1 emergency dispatch service. People who love a child do not immediately give up on trying to save her.  Furthermore, the lengthy delay between the time of death and the first report of it by Cindy Anthony points to a homicide, according to Garavaglia, who said that typically missing children are reported within the first couple of days of being missing. The defense can not possibly have any proof of a drowning, which once again is an immutable cornerstone of its case. How will it convince the jury of the veracity of the assertions in its opening arguments, which seem so cloudy now after the prosecution’s laboriously methodical case presentation? I haven’t the foggiest idea.

Baez has a mere three years of trial experience, and has conducted only one murder defense, which he lost. Significantly better qualified attorneys exist on his team, for example Cheney Mason, but he has been loath to use them. Whether or not he does during the defense phase is anyone’s guess. Ms. Anthony is betting her life on Baez’s strategy. Yet he has demonstrated his lack of ability throughout the prosecution’s case.

This is a death penalty case. If Ms. Anthony is convicted, a punishment phase will determine whether the death penalty will be imposed. It is one thing to get a conviction, but quite another to get the death penalty. Only two women have been executed by the State of Florida during the time it has been conducting executions.

Judge Perry believes that closing summations can be completed and the evidence can be handed to the jury for deliberation on June 25 or June 27, the end of next week.  Then, things get really interesting.

Not all the drama of the past month has taken place inside the courtroom. Daily skirmishes occur outside as people wait to see if they can get seats in the courtroom. There are always more interested people than there are seats. Yes, it’s a circus, and Geraldo, Greta, and Nancy Grace are its omnipresent barkers.

Hooked

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America is once again in the throes of a high-profile criminal trial with its attendant media circus. This one is taking place right in the Turkey’s backyard: Orlando, Florida. We here in Central Florida have been trying the case unofficially since the news of the missing child first broke almost three years ago. However, now we will have an OJ-esque month of testimony to review to either corroborate or refute the theories we developed in our informal deliberations, and a jury decision to decide the case once and for all (pending appeals, of course).

I admit that I am hooked. I will try to keep my verbal gobbling about the trial to a minimum out of respect for the people around me who are sick and tired of the mediafest already. However, I will occasionally bombard readers of this meager blog with my opinions concerning the event. Your Turkey figures that you know how to navigate elsewhere when you’ve had enough!

For those of you outside the area, a two year-old child, Caylee Anthony, “disappeared” almost three years ago. The mother, Casey Anthony, a 22 year-old single woman at the time, waited thirty days from the time the child vanished to report her missing. This immediately cast suspicions upon the mother, who contrived a story about a mythical babysitter being the last person to have seen young Caylee. Around this time, Casey was also convicted of forgery, having stolen a friend’s checkbook and cashed one of her checks. Casey has been in jail ever since; she was formally indicted for the premeditated murder of her daughter while in the slammer.

One problem early in the progression of events is that no body had been found; however, eventually, decomposed remains positively identified as the missing child turned up in a wooded area down the street from the Anthony home, where Casey lived with her mother, Cindy, and her father, George. The discovery was made by a meter reader who ostensibly had entered the woods to urinate. Some of the circumstances of the discovery have been questioned repeatedly. At one point, defense counsel charged that the body had been planted there by the meter reader.

One of the reasons that this is such a high profile trial is that the range of punishments available to the court for this first degree murder charge includes the death penalty, which is bound to attract activists on both sides of the capital punishment debate. Another, which I mentioned before, is the large number of people who have already tried and convicted Casey in their minds, who now seek vindication by a formal verdict consistent with that of their mental kangaroo court. I did an informal, non-scientific Facebook poll asking if Casey did it. There were four possible responses: Yes (about 60%), No (0%), I’ll let the jury decide (30%), and I don’t give a rat’s ass (10%). The significant thing to note from my little study is that nobody feels passionately that Casey is innocent.

The jury was selected in Clearwater, on the Gulf Coast, in the hopes that prospective jurors would be less biased from the daily infusions of information and misinformation about the case against Casey. The pool of jurors was eventually pared down and the trial began in the Orange County Courthouse in Orlando yesterday.

The prosecution’s opening statements consisted of a timeline of events between the disappearance of Caylee and the present. It was well laid out but delivered in a flat, non-charismatic manner. The facts as represented by the prosecution are consistent with the opinions of many of the kibitzers who have decided the case from the peanut gallery, so there were no great surprises there.

The surprises came after lunch with lead defense counsel José Baez laying out his version of the story. He impugned the prosecution’s conclusions by stating an entirely new theory. Caylee was never missing. Instead, she drowned in an unattended above-ground pool in the Anthonys’ back yard. Meanwhile, Casey had been a victim of sexual abuse by both her father, George, and her older brother. This created a climate of denial and lying for poor Casey, whose own lying could now be quite well understood. Baez was graphically specific about one of the sex acts George allegedly repeatedly performed on Casey, burning into the jurors’ minds an indelible image of Casey giving oral sex to her father as a teenager as she readied herself for school in the morning. No one heretofore had mentioned anything about an abusive family relationship, so Baez was either grandstanding with an invented dysfunctional family story concocted with the intent of  instilling reasonable doubt in the jurors, or he and his team are brilliant researchers. My personal suspicion is the former.

After Baez concluded his surprising opening, the prosecution called its first witness, George Anthony. Utilizing its plodding, methodical style, the prosecution team bored us by walking through George’s life, from his 20s until now, and then asking about the details of Caylee’s disappearance and related events. Ho hum. Are we going to have to put up with these anal retentive questioning sessions for the rest of the trial? And why do lawyers insist on starting every new question with “Now…”? I’ve noticed this during my stints on jury duty. You never see that on TV lawyer shows, where actors know how to deliver lines. “Now, back in 2008, you and your wife, Cindy, separated at some point?” But I digress.

Baez’s cross-examination (also replete with questions starting with “Now…”) was surprisingly dull, if not incompetent. He did not even pursue the whole area of sexual abuse. This leads me to believe that it might be a crock out of left field, which he hoped would generate doubt in jurors’ minds. Baez’s questioning was interrupted by prosecution objections far too many times, most of which were sustained by Judge Belvin Perry. Several lengthy sidebars caused the jury to yawn and fidget. They were clearly getting bored as this crap wore on late in the afternoon. Finally, Perry was asked by one of the attorneys, “May we approach?” A flat-out “No!” was the response. Perry also admonished Baez at least twice to allow Anthony to completely answer the question before interrupting him with another question. I can foresee the judge getting quite testy with this cast of characters as the trial progresses.

It appears to this Turkey that Baez is trying to pound some things into jurors’ heads which he spins as damning toward George, but which are not improper. At one point, Baez attempted to paint Anthony in a bad light by dwelling on the notion that he had contacted his attorney and discussed the matter with him before taking the witness stand. This is perfectly legal, as Judge Perry stated, reading the law verbatim to the jury so they would not hold the attorney discussion against George. The fact that the attorney in question was also an old friend of Anthony’s was brought out by the prosecution later, during re-direct examination.

Courtroom junkies such as I have much to look forward to in forthcoming testimony. The issue of the dead body smell in Casey’s car is sure to be explored literally ad nauseam. Mr. Krunk, the meter reader who discovered the body, is sure to be impeached by Baez. There will undoubtedly be testimony by Orange-Osceola County Medical Examiner Jan Garavaglia, the famous “Dr. G” of television. The computer searches found on the Anthonys’ computer for terms such as “choroform”, “shovel”, “household weapons”, and “neck-breaking” surely will be beaten to death (no pun intended).

Hell, I have jury duty next week, so I can get into the groove this week. No way will I get anything as potentially interesting and yet at the same time as potentially boring as the Casey Anthony trial. But I don’t want to spend a month on the jury, anyway.

For those of you outside of Central Florida who crave coverage of the trial, there are several options. HLN (Head Line News) is covering the event live; however, the commercial breaks are frequent and annoying. Each of the network TV stations in Orlando is doing a streaming, live, commercial-free feed on its web site. These are WESH, WKMG, WFTV, and WOFL.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and I don’t even play one on TV. If you’re looking for a blog where you can get astute legal analysis, you’re in the wrong place. What you’ll get here is my opinion, which has no bearing on anything except my amusement and perhaps, yours.