Providing Some Legal (In)expertise
So this post is a little late in coming, with the Casey Anthony Media Event having died down considerably, and I’m sure most everyone is already sick of hearing/talking about it. But I’ve been wanting to give my take on the trial for about a week now and just haven’t had the time.
I usually hate these Criminal Trial Extravaganzas put on by the the national media. I had my fill of that watching the O.J. Trial. So even though I live in Florida, I didn’t really pay much attention. I watched a little of the trial in the same way I might watch an episode of Law and Order, purely because it happens to be on TV. But I make it a point to skip watching Greta Van Susteren and Nancy Grace, and all the other legal topics/news shows that thrive off that kind of thing.
Having said that, I wasn’t all that surprised she was acquitted. I doubted she would get convicted on Murder One. In fact I was pretty sure she hadn’t actually committed murder. My sense of the case was that she was probably a grossly irresponsible young woman, of a piece with some girls I’ve known, who managed to kill her kid through her own profound idiocy and negligence. I supposed she probably tried to put her child to sleep either by chloroforming her, or feeding her sleeping pills, or Nyquil; gave her too much; killed her; then panicked, dumped the body; and made believe like it had never even happened. This seemed like the most likely chain of events based on her actions.
In fact, as I started to plan out this post, I was intending to criticize the prosecution as being incompetent. I thought their theory of the crime was simply incredible. Ridiculous, I thought, was it for her to have chloroformed her daughter, then duck-taped her to death. No one would believe that. Far more likely she duck-taped her mouth to make it look like a kidnapping. No one would ever believe that’s what really happened. And her motive: that she killed her to avoid having responsibility? Preposterous, said I. Clearly it must have been unintentional.
But then I sat down and read the Wikipedia article on the case and slowly, as I read up on what was presented and what was said, the prosecution’s theory became more and more likely to me. I am actually now convinced that their theory is exactly what happened. She killed her daughter by suffocating her with duck-tape so that she would be relieved of the responsibility of being a parent.
The prosecution, contrary to my original thoughts, did a good job presenting their case. The evidence is simply overwhelming. And there in lay the problem. The case was too overwhelming. I think the only thing that the prosecution can be criticized for is that it failed to make the members of the jury understand exactly what their task was, i.e. the jury simply flubbed their legal responsibility and the prosecution couldn’t correct for that.
This case is as clear an example as any of the CSI effect in action. Had this case gone to trial 10 years ago Casey Anthony would be headed for death row. The circumstantial evidence alone was enough to convict her at least of manslaughter. No one covers up an accident. If there is a cover-up, ipso facto, their must be a crime. If the child is dead then someone is criminally responsible for her death. There is simply no other explanation. You don’t need to know the motive, the cause of death, you don’t even need a body to convict. But, with the increased use of forensic evidence and scientific analysis, and the general assumption that such evidence is always 100% conclusive, nowadays circumstantial evidence isn’t enough. Juries want fingerprints and DNA and aren’t satisfied unless that evidence is absolutely accurate, which of course is almost never the case.
To their credit, the prosecution seemed to recognize that the overwhelming circumstantial evidence was not going to be enough for this jury and so laid out the forensic evidence as well. The trouble with their case was, even though there was plenty of forensic evidence to support witness testimony (the smell of decomposition testified by George Anthony and the tow truck driver, supported by chemicals indicative of decomposition found in the trunk, the stain), the presence of various articles from the Anthony home at the crime scene, the presence of chloroform in the trunk, etc., etc., none of these pieces of evidence was 100% conclusive. Most importantly, there was no forensic evidence showing a cause of death. Because none of this evidence was 100% I think the jurors simply discounted it all as unreliable. Without the smoking forensic gun, the cause of death, to tie it all together the jury felt like it was all worthless.
The Prosecution let the jury have the impression that the evidence was full of holes when, in fact, all evidence has some holes in it, and the more evidence you have the more holes. But instead of focusing on the evidence they allowed the defense to highlight the holes.
But the prosecution’s real, fundamental error was in being unable to explain to the jury what the law required of them. Defense attorneys are fond of the phrase “beyond a reasonable doubt” and always follow a tactic of trying to show that “reasonable doubt exists” in any case. But in reality “reasonable doubt” is the prosecutor’s best friend. Rather than implying some sort of objective legal standard, a kind of evidentiary hurdle that the prosecution must jump over, reasonable doubt means that the prosecution need not convince the Jury of it’s case 100%. A juror does not have to be totally, totally convinced. Reasonable doubt is simply a recognition that nothing in this world is completely certain, and that even if a Juror has some doubts to the guilt of the accused, he or she may still convict, provided those doubts are the typical kind of doubts associated with making any kind of important decision.
I think it probably that most if not all of the jurors were quite convinced that Casey Anthony was responsible for the death of her daughter. Look at the Jurors’ responses. These people were convinced that Casey Anthony had committed the crime, but in spite of themselves, they seem to have believed that even though she was guilty, that her guilt “had not been proved beyond a reasonable doubt” i.e. that it had not been proved to some sort of outside, legalistic, objective standard. They were convinced but not legally convinced. Yet the very point of having a jury of the accused’s peers, and not professional jurors, is because the burden of proof is to convince the average person of guilt, not to prove guilt to some benchmark standard. This is an easy trap to fall in to and the prosecution must be blamed for not driving home the point to the jurors.
The Prosecution’s case was much too complex and should have been boiled down to a few basic concepts.
- Casey Anthony covered up the death of her daughter.
- Covering up a death implies responsibility in that death. If you saw a man burying a body in the woods there is a 99.99% likelihood he is responsible for killing that person.
- If Casey Anthony is responsible for the death of her daughter then she must be guilt of at the very least a negligent homicide.
- Jurors need not know exactly what happened, need not know the motive, need not now the how, when, or why, all they need to do is believe that she is guilty and need not apply some legal yardstick to that belief. Only if there is a glaring doubt as to her culpability, if there is some glaring unanswered question about her guilt is there reasonable doubt.
- If a juror asks him or her self “Did Casey Anthony kill her daughter” and the answer is “no” then they must vote to acquit. If the answer is “maybe” then they ought to acquit. If the answer is “probably” then they ought to acquit. But if a juror can ask his or herself this question and the first answer that comes to their mind is “yes” then guilt has been established beyond a reasonable doubt and that juror’s duty is to convict.
The Defense, for it’s part, did a pretty good job of what they had to work with. I think Jose Baez realized that, since the case was too complex, that he had a good chance of winning. So he crafted an elegantly simple defense strategy that was based on three parts: Firstly, put the guilt on other parties. Second, throw up as much chafe as possible to confuse the jury and cloud the central issues of the case. Three, make the jury hate the prosecution’s witnesses as much as they were likely to hate Casey Anthony. And the nexus of this approach, where all three of these roads combined was George Anthony.
Baez was faced with several serious problems. He had an extremely unlikable client who had repeatedly lied to the police and was obviously guilty. Her actions simply screamed guilt, and he needed a way to explain them, make her seem more sympathetic, and provide other possible suspects for the jurors. So he crafted a story that hit all these notes. George Anthony had molested his daughter, which explains her various character flaws (the sluttiness, the arrogance, the pathological lying, the selfishness etc.). When little Caylee accidentally drowned in his pool he was worried that investigations would reveal he had molested Casey when she was younger. So he hid the body, and should it be discovered, he intentionally set up Casey to take the wrap by making it look like she killed her daughter while convincing her to lie about it. And, incredible as it may seem, Baez’s relentless Character assassination of George Anthony, combined with the fact that Anthony is not a very likable person to begin with, and was confrontational and evasive on the witness stand, worked. It drew the jury’s attention away from Casey and the central question of the case: Is Casey Anthony responsible for the death of her daughter?
Baez also worked to obscure the prosecution’s forensic evidence as much as possible. His ruthless assault on Roy Kronk, the meter-reader who reported finding the remains is also a perfect example of Baez’s strategy to sew confusion. By focusing in on minor inconsistencies in the details of Kronk’s testimony (and ignoring the important points) Baez sought to discredit his testimony and thus all the forensic evidence obtained from the crime scene, while at the same time baselessly accusing Kronk of having maliciously tampered with the evidence in a plot to make money and possibly frame Casey, in an effort to throw one more thing at the jury for them to have to consider. In effect, Baez went for the Chewbacca Defense, and it worked perfectly.
As for Casey Anthony, I firmly believe that not only did she murder her daughter, but that she is a sociopath. Her narcissistic behavior, her outrageous lying, and her total lack of sympathy for any person but herself speaks volumes. And like O.J. Simpson and Joran Van Der Sloot, I don’t think she will be able to restrain her personality. She will run afoul of the law again because, I think, she believes that the rules don’t apply to her. I am willing to bet good money that in the next five years Casey Anthony will be arrested again. My own prediction is she’ll be involved in a DUI manslaughter case. I have no doubt that she will get her comeuppance sooner or later.
As for what this says about the criminal justice system: well first off it shows that it is getting harder and harder to convict someone and that prosecutors have to do a better job at not just presenting the evidence, but at explaining to jurors what the law is. Juries need to understand that reasonable doubt isn’t a legal standard that they must adhere to but based on their own opinion and gut-reaction to the evidence. Also, I think this case demonstrates that even the most hated and reviled person can still get a fair trial in this country, which, on the whole is probably the only good thing to come out of the entire sorry affair.
