Latest / Both Things Are True Crime / Caylee Anthony: A Homicide With No Cause | Casey Anthony Case (Part 2 of 3)
Transcript
- caylee pt2 edited: Courthouse in Clearwater in Pinellas County, about a hundred miles from Orlando on the Gulf side of the state, Monday, May 9th, 2011. A group of 120 people from Pinellas County has been brought in and has filled out a short questionnaire. And the chief judge of Orlando Circuit, Belvin Perry, has brought the case here with the lawyers and the defendant because the coverage has been so heavy that he will not pick this jury from Orange County. And he says we are about to begin jury selection in the case. In the state against Casey Anthony. And that morning, according to the reports from the courthouse, there was a discussion of a plea. Whatever the terms were, they wouldn't require her to admit what happened to Kaylee. And she said no. So she goes into the room and the questioning begins. And as I always do, we're gonna leave her here, okay? On the first morning, jury selection saying no. Because in order to understand why she could say no. And why that's not really a crazy bet, I want y'all to understand what happened in the two and a half years between an medical examiner saying her daughter's name and this courtroom. All right. Almost none of it happened in front of a jury, but all of it decided what a jury would get to hear. So let's talk about it. Friday, December 19, 2008. Part one ended here. Part two starts here. On that same sentence, Dr. Jan says, the remains off of Suburban Drive are Kayleigh Marie Anthony. That the manner of death is homicide, and that the cause will be listed as homicide by undetermined means. And the remains are completely skeletonized. There's no sign of trauma to the bones before death and toxicology is pending. She's certain a person killed Kaylee. She cannot say how. And that sentence is going to be the whole trial. And now here's why it matters in 2011 specifically. And this is a rule that does not exist in Florida anymore. So I think it's worth saying out loud. Until 2020, Florida had a special standard for cases built entirely on circumstantial evidence. If the state had no direct evidence, no confession or eyewitness cause of death, then at the close of its case, the judge would ask whether the evidence was inconsistent with every reasonable hypothesis of innocence. And if the defense could Offer a reasonable version where the defendant did not do it, then the state's evidence did not rule it out. And the judge was supposed to take that case away from the jury. And so Florida courts, excuse me, have used that rule for decades. The Florida Supreme Court threw it out in May 2020 in a case called Bush versus State, and they called it unwarranted and confusing. And before that, it hung over every circumstantial murder case in the state. And In this one, it shaped everything because a death with no cause means every piece of tape has to carry the weight a cause of death usually carries. The computer, the tape, the lie. So all that piece of evidence, it has to carry that weight that the cause of death would normally be able to explain. So the state attorney's office for the Ninth Circuit, the office Lawson Lamar led as state attorney through the trial, already had their indictment from October. And it has the prosecutors who will try the case, Linda, Burdick, Jeff Ashton, and Frank George. And it has a decision it announced in court papers on December the 5th that it would not be seeking death. And that decision lasts for about four months. But then the state attorney's office on April 13th, they filed this notice of intent to seek the death penalty. And the filing says additional information has become available since December and that sufficient aggravating circumstances exist. To justify the imposition of the death penalty. So let's do a little quick lesson on what that sentence means because it's gonna matter for the verdict. So in Florida, at the time, a jury that convicted someone of first degree murder went on to a second phase. And this phase is where you weighed the aggravating circumstances against the mitigating one and recommended life or death. And the judge made the final decision. So the aggravators are a list in the statute. 921.141. And among them, the victim was under 12. The killing was especially heinous, atrocious or cruel, and it was code calculated and premeditated. Now the coverage of the notice did not say which ones the state meant to prove. But what changes when the state acts for death is the juries. Because in a capital case, the jury, in a capital case, the jury is death qualified. So people who say they could never vote for death. They're actually screened out. And researchers have argued for decades about what that screening does. And a 1984 study found that juries made up of entirely death qualified jurors were significantly more likely to convict. And other researchers have not really been able to reproduce that result. But I'm just telling you the argument exists because a death qualified jury is the jury Casey Anthony got. And a spokesperson for her lawyer put out a statement. That this is not a death penalty case. The defense team, she said, already included death qualified lawyers. And that lawyer is Jose Baez. And this is where he stops being a name. Born in Puerto Rico, raised in the Bronx in South Florida by a single mother, dropped out of high school in the ninth grade, married and a father at 17. He got his GED and he joined the Navy where he trained as an intelligence analyst. Then he went back to school and graduated from St. Thomas University's Law School in Miami in 1997. And then Florida would not let him. In 2000, the Florida Supreme Court, in an order that identified him only by his initials, affirmed the denial of his admission and it cited unpaid bills, a bankruptcy, unpaid child support, a bad check that he did not tell the bar about, and a pretrial program he had entered to avoid a conviction. So they said that his conduct showed a total lack of respect for the rights of others and a lack of Of respect for the legal system. So for the next five years, Mr. Jose Baez actually worked as a paralegal for the Miami Day Public Defender. And he taught internet research to lawyers for Lexus Nexus. And he started four businesses, two of which actually sold bikinis. And he was admitted to the Florida bar in 2005. And in 2008, a little known lawyer in Kissimmee he heard from a 22-year-old in the Orange County jail. And a story that has been told since. Is that the people in the jail with her gave her his name? And by the time this part, he's been a licensed lawyer for about five years. And across from the aisle, the prosecution team has had more than 70 years of experience between them. Now, this isn't a reason to root for anybody because in context, because the coverage called him relatively inexperienced and unprepared when he took the case. And critics questioned his competence literally right up to the verdict. And so then in August 2008, before any of this was a murder case, an air sample from the trunk of the white Pontiac was reported as consistent with human remains. And that sample came from a piece of the trunk's carpet sealed in a can. And the scientist who tested the air was Dr. Arpad Voss. A senior researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. And he built a reference list of more than 400 chemical compounds from donated bodies decomposing at the University of Tennessee's research facility known as the Body Farm, gathered over four years. And so him and his colleague, they drew air out of the can with a syringe and they ran it through gas chromatography and mass spectrometry, which separates a sample into its chemicals and it names them. And before the trial, the reporting on his findings. He said he found compound seen in early decomposition, that chloroform at about ten thousandths time the level he would expect, and that he couldn't say with certainty the odor came from a decaying human body. And at trial in 2011, he testified that the smell when he opened the can was extremely overwhelmingly strong, that he actually jumped back a foot or two. But let's talk about the law a little bit. So before a jury in Florida in 2011 could hear Dr. Vass, a judge had to decide. Whether his method was even admissible. And so Florida used what is called the Fry test. And the Fry test is from a 1923 federal case called Fry versus United States to 93 F 1013. So quick lesson on citations once a case site is volume reporter name. Volume two ninety three of the federal report, page 1013. So from now on, I'll just say the case names. But Fry, he has one question. Is the scientific technique generally accepted in the relevant scientific community? It's not about if it's correct. It's not about if the expert is brilliant, but it's about if the field agrees it is a valid method. And if it's yes, the jury hears it and they can decide how much it's worth. And if it's no, the jury never hears it at all. So the defense lines up scientists against this. Barry Logan, a toxicologist, he said that allowing the findings into the court would lend them an aura. Of scientific authority not justified by their novel nature. Kenneth Furton, an analytical chemist at Florida International University, said in court documents that there was no scientifically valid method for identifying human remains from chemical residue in the air, and that Voss's method was still in the experimental stage, basically. And so the defense owned filing said his opinions and theories range from the interesting to the bizarre. And that is the fight. A real researcher with a real data set and a new idea against two real researchers saying, Hey, this idea has not been tested enough to send a woman to death row on. Both sides are scientists. Fry, it doesn't want to know the act to judge who is right. It basically just wants to know whether the field has made up its mind. So the other half of the state scientist is the Anthony's family's computer. So in that house on Hope Spring Drive. On November 26, 2008, the court documents released to the public described internet searches on it that included the words neck breaking and household weapons. So forensic examiners, they also found searches about chloroform on two days in March 2008, March 17th, and the 21st, about three months before Kaylee was last seen. So the state's theory built in this window was simple: chloroform in the trunk air, chloroform on the computer, the same word in two places. So Two things are gonna come out of that computer at trial, and both of them get fought over. The first is how many times a website about making chloroform was visited. And the state's computer expert testified it was 84. And the second is who was sitting at the keyboard? And now both of those fights are gonna happen in part three, okay? One in front of the jury with the grandmother on the witness stand and one after the verdict. When the man whose software produced the 84 says that the sites was visited once. But I'm just planting them here because the evidence was put together here and I like to go in chronological order in two thousand and eight. So this is long before anyone outside a lab wanted to know whether the software was reading the file right. So that's gonna be part three. But For the first year and a half, the judge that they have is Strickland, and he is a circuit judge in Orange County. Now, in the spring of 2010, this case is a fixture on cable television and on blogs, and the defense is preparing to get a change of venue because of exactly that. But while working on the venue question, Strickland has reviewed the coverage of the case online. And he had spoken in open court with one of the bloggers covering it. So late on a Friday in April 2010, Baez team files a motion to disqualify him. And they basically call the judge a self-aggrandizing media hound. I probably said that wrong, I apologize. But Strickland ends up stepping aside. In his order on April 19th, 2010, he says that the motion appears to have positioned to maximize media attention. And he writes of being called a media hound. Indeed, the irony is rich. He says he did nothing wrong, but he steps aside anyway, he writes, to avoid the likely repetition of the bias agreement at multiple points down the road. So here's the law. Florida rule of general practice and judicial administration 2.330. A party can move to disqualify a judge if it reasonably fears it will not get a fair hearing because of a specifically described prejudice or bias. On a first motion like this, the judge. Does not get to decide whether that fear is true. He only gets to make a choice if the motion is legally sufficient. And if it is, he enters the order and he is out. And the order doesn't admit that anything in that motion is true. And that's why a judge who believes he did nothing wrong can still be required to leave. And why Strickland's order read the way it does, because it does not concede the point. Instead, it's conceding to the process. So from here on out, the judge is Belvin Perry, the chief judge of the Ninth Circuit. So then January 2011, Perry actually sanctions Baez because the defense had ordered to give the prosecutors more information about its expert witnesses, right? But it didn't. So then in court, Perry's like, hey, was there any particular reason why this is not complied with? But Bias, he's like, the traffic is heavy and Kissimmee. And this file, it's just too large to fax. Now, the ruling has two parts. First, you get a fine five hundred and eighty-three dollars and seventy three cents. The state's cost for the seven hours is spent on the sanctioned motions. And then bias pays it on January 12th. And then second, and this is the one that matters, any expert opinion not closed in a report will not be allowed at trial. Now that second part is the kind of ruling I don't think anybody outside a court house probably notices it, but I bet you every lawyer inside one figures it because a fine is a headline. An exclusion order is a hole in your case. That you do not see until the day a witness stands up and you can't even ask the question you plan to ask. So whether the way the defense came across in the stretch was a strategy accident, I don't know. But I don't think anybody I said that defense table does. What? I don't know. Bayez be slick. That's kinda why I like him a little bit though. But he be slick. I ain't gonna lie, he's slick. So late April 2011, two weeks before jury selection, Perry rules on what the jury will hear. And then April 26th, this is a Tuesday. An FBI examiner's testimony, she said that she saw the residue of a heart shaped sticker on the duct tape found with Kayleigh's remains. And that's allowed as long as the state lays a proper foundation. So then a cadaver dog, handler, she testifies that his dog, or he testified that his dog alerted on the trunk of the car and in the Anthony backyard as well, and that was allowed. And also what was allowed, a hair from the trunk that the state's expert said showed post mortem banding. Which basically means that it basically means that a hair came from the body, but that's not the only explanation. So that's also allowed. And then the chloroform found in the trunk on the twenty seventh of April, that gets allowed in, with Perry finding that it could be connected to the chloroform searches on the family computer. And the air sample was still waiting that week. Perry let it in too. And how reliable vast methods were is a question that the jurors would have to basically settle for themselves. So two of those rulings, I think they show how Perry handled evidence. The defense said was not good enough. Because the heart shaped residue was never photographed. It was gone after testing, so the defense experts could never examine it. the defense called it the phantom st heart sticker evidence. And the examiner herself had reportedly said, What I saw could be a sticker, it could be anything. But Perry, he let her testify anyway, once that foundation was laid. And on the dogs, the defense argued that a cadaver dog could confuse the smell of a body with hair, blood, or fingernails. But Perry also decided to let the dog's accuracy be up to the jury to decide. And now here's where fry cash is in, okay? Because the air sample was the real fry fight. new science basically wanting to be let into the case. So some of the others came with a condition, a proper foundation first. Either way, every one of these rulings is a judge deciding whether 12 people can hear it. And that fight over what it proves belongs to the trial. Well, the defense lost every one of them. If you read only those rulings, you would think the state had won the case before it even started. But what the defense got instead was a trial in which the state put in a usual amount of novel science in front of a jury, all of it admissible, much of it contested, some of it with a defense expert ready to say that it was experimental. And see, admissible doesn't mean persuasive. Fry only opens the door. The jury still has to decide if they even want to walk through it. So the last big pretrial decision is where the jury comes from. Because there are two ways to handle a case that has basically saturated a county. A change of venue, it moves the whole trial somewhere else. And a change of veneer, it keeps the trial at home. And it brings in jurors from somewhere else. So this is what Perry did. The trial stayed in Orange County Courthouse in Orlando, but the jury came from Pinellas County, the county that holds St. Petersburg, that's where was born, and Clearwater, about a hundred miles away. And I think the point of a county like that. Is distance because 100 miles is far enough that people there knew this case as a story on television, not so much as a face on the wall of their gas stations. So the jurors chosen there would end up being sequestered in Orlando for the entire trial. So jury selection runs from Monday, May 9th, 2011, to Friday, May 20th. And on the first day, a group of 120 are brought in. And by that evening, 66 have been questioned and 45 have been sent home. Each potential juror is questioned individually, and they are asked whether they would recommend or they could recommend the death penalty. Anyone who could not would be disqualified. So on the evening of May 20th, the panel is sworn. 12 jurors, 7 men, 5 women, all from the Tampa Bay area, and five alternatives. Their jobs range from a supermarket cook to a Verizon representative. The man the jury will choose as his foreman is a high school PE teacher. And they all, like I said, sequestered in Orlando for the whole trent length of the trial. So now we're back on the first morning in Clearwater, May 9th, 2011. And now you know what she was looking at when she said no. Because the state that had said it would not seek death, then said it would. And a cause of death that said undetermined. And a Florida rule that said a case built only on circumstance. Had to rule out every reasonable version of innocence and a judge who had let in every piece of the state's science I have told you about, and who left his weight to a jury, and a defense lawyer five years into his license, who had been fined and whose competence critics were really questioning. And a jury about to be chosen from a county that had only watched. Now, I don't know what was in that offer. The reporting from that morning says only that she would have had to admit every detail of Kaylee's murder. Two months later, a jury acquitted her of that murder. And see, whether saying no was her call or her lawyers or both, I don't know. But she went into the courtroom and two weeks later, 12 people from Vanellas County raised their right hand. Now, this is where Jaquela finally gets a little bit of her old her own funk into it, her own thoughts into it, okay? Because this is the part of the case I did not understand at 14, okay? Because at 14, child, I'm telling you, it ain't like nothing. Two and a half years of a woman in a jail and lawyers on television, and that little girl from the Flyers had already been found, and the trial kept not starting. It almost felt like the system was stalling, but it wasn't stalling. This is the part where the case was actually decided, and almost none of it was in front of a jury. So here's what I think about the science, and I'm gonna be careful about it, okay? Fry asked whether scientists agree. It doesn't ask whether the science works. Those are two different questions. In 1993, the US Supreme Court and Dobert. Versus Meryl Dahl gave federal courts a standard built around whether expert testimony is reliable. And Florida stayed with Fry through its trial. The Florida legislator passed a law switching to Daubert in 2013, and the Florida Supreme Court refused to adopt it in 2017 and 2018. That legislator could not make that change on its own. And then it adopted Daubert itself in May 2019. Now, I think this case is a good argument for why they switched. Because the state science was wrong, some of it may have been right, but because a test that only acts, whether experts agree, will let a new method in its own field when its own field is still arguing. come on. That's the only thing the test acts. Whether the experts agree, and if they agree, then they will let a n a new method in its own field. I don't know. I guess I just feel like that's really messy and complex and like difficult, right? That's like asking someone in a change, would you agree if I decide to put this in a DSM or whatever? Like, they're probably not gonna agree with that, in my personal opinion. But then you also hand the argument to 12 people from Vanelas County who are not scientists and they're not supposed to be. And I don't think that's their fault either. I think that's just the design. But also, here's what I think about Jose Baez, okay? And it's gonna sound very contradictory because it is, okay? I hate who he gets off. I'm not gonna pretend I don't. But also, Jose Baez so good at his job and watching him work. Part of why I want to go to law school someday, okay? Because I want to be specific about what I admire. It's not the outcome. It's that the Florida Supreme Court told him in writing in 2000 that he had a total lack of respect for the legal system. And he spent five years as a paralegal fixing that. And he got in and then he took this case and he spent two and a half years being told he ain't belong that room. And he kept walking into that room. Listen, I do not need anyone to agree with his clients to respect that. And the thing I keep coming back to. Is the word undetermined? Everything in this part is the state of Florida trying to fill it in a can of air, a computer, a hair, a sticker, nobody photograph, a dog in the backyard. And everything the fence did in this part was keep the word empty. And that's not a trick, that's the job. Because the state has to prove how the defense don't gotta prove nothing. And at 14, I would have told you that this was unfair. I don't really think that anymore. I think it's the only thing standing between any of us. And a jury that has already watched us on television. If it's gonna be fair for her, it's gonna be fair for us. If it's gonna be fair for us, it's gonna be fair for her. And that's just the way it is, you know what I'm saying? So then Friday evening, May 20th, 2011, 12 people from Pinellas County, seven men, five women, five alternatives were sworn in, and the opening statements are set for Tuesday in Orlando. And Kaylee Marie Anthony has been gone for almost three years. She would have turned six in August. And in this part, she was a subject of every hearing and the name on every filing. And she was not in a single room where anything was decided. And that is what the law does to the person at the center of a case like this. It literally turns her into the question. So the state of Florida spent two and a half years building the most scientifically ambitious case it could. And a judge let nearly all of it in. And a defendant facing death turned a plea down on the First day of jury selection and the medical examiner certificate still says homicide by undetermined means and every piece of that science was being shown to a jury for the first time by people who cannot agree among themselves on what it proved. And both of those were in the room on May 20th, and only one of them was gonna matter on July the fifth. We're gonna be saying her name every Every time. Kaylee Marie Anthony. Part three is the trial. Tuesday, May twenty-fourth, two thousand eleven. A defense opening statement that tells the jury something nobody in this country expected. A grandmother in the witness stand saying she was the one doing the searches. A meter reader. And what the defense says about him. Six weeks, a verdict after less than eleven hours of deliberation over two days, and a number eighty four. That falls apart after it is over. That's what's next.