Justice Denied? The Sensational Murder Trial of Casey Anthony
In 2008, the remains of missing two-year-old Caylee Anthony were discovered in a wooded area. Suspicion quickly fell on the child's young mother, Casey; her murder trial would shock the nation
Background
In July 2011, after a six-week trial, a jury determined that young single mother Casey Anthony was not guilty of first-degree murder in the death of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee Anthony.
The ruling was met with immediate shock and outrage by the press and the American public, who had closely followed the case since Caylee’s body was discovered in a plastic bag in the woods near the Anthony family home.
In the eyes of nearly everyone watching, Casey was indisputably guilty, but the criminal justice system did not reach the same conclusion.
In response to the decision, Nancy Grace–a polarizing television personality who had covered the case extensively, announced to her audience that “somewhere out there, the devil is dancing tonight.”
For some years, though, it seemed the book had been more or less closed on Caylee’s death. Her mother went free, and, over time, people started to forget.
Everything changed in 2022 when streaming platform Peacock released Where the Truth Lies, a documentary where Casey presents her side of the story and attempts to clear her name.
The problem?
Casey has had plenty of opportunities to share her side of the story–and none of her accounts seem to match up.
The release of Where the Truth Lies was met with nearly as much vitriol as the verdict itself. It was panned by critics, and rather than clearing Casey’s name, it merely seemed to remind watchers of why she was so hated in the first place.
Disappearance of Caylee Anthony
On July 15, 2008, Orlando, Florida, resident Cindy Anthony made a frantic 911 call.
She reported that her granddaughter, Caylee, had been missing for the past 31 days.
When police contacted Caylee’s mother, Casey, she reported that her daughter had been kidnapped by her nanny, Zenaida “Zanny” Gonzalez (a nickname that some speculate may have been a reference to the frequently abused prescription drug Xanax).
This was a lie: investigators quickly found out that there was no nanny. Casey lied about that, and she also lied about her workplace; after claiming that she worked at Universal Studios, investigators visited the premises with her and asked to see her office, forcing Casey to admit that she had never actually been employed there.
Despite Casey’s shady and erratic behavior with the police, investigators struggled to find hard evidence to tie her to the case.
Her car was abandoned and impounded, and some (including her father, George, who picked up the car from the tow yard) reported that it had an odd smell, described by some as “the smell of human decomposition.”
Odd searches, such as “chloroform” and “foolproof suffocation,” were found on her web browser.
And, most damningly, despite the defense’s claims that she had always been a loving and attentive mother, Casey never once made an attempt to report her child missing.
Discovery of Caylee and Trial
On December 11, 2008, the remains of a child were discovered in a trash bag in a wooded area near the Anthony home. On December 18, the remains were confirmed to be Caylee’s. The cause of death was ruled as homicide by the medical examiner.
It should have been an open-shut case.
Within days of the 911 call, Casey was still seemingly enjoying her life–going out partying at night, acting as though nothing was wrong. Two weeks after Cayley went missing, Casey got a new tattoo of the words “belle vita”–Latin for “beautiful life.”
As one prosecutor provocatively asked the court, “Whose life was better without Caylee?”
But there were no fingerprints, and for whatever reason, the prosecution relied on untested, questionable forensic techniques–what the defense referred to as “fantasy forensics”–and failed to thoroughly probe the hard evidence against Casey they did have at their disposal.
Prosecutors hoped that it would be enough to make a character argument against Casey. She was a party girl, unprepared to make the sacrifices necessary to raise a daughter–and a pathological liar, to boot.
To make the case even harder, the autopsy of Caylee’s body was insufficient to prove homicide as the cause of death. The defense was able to somewhat persuasively argue that Caylee had drowned in the family pool; the two-year-old loved water and was able to open the family’s sliding glass door on her own.
Later, in Where the Truth Lies, Casey (who has consistently claimed that she was sexually abused by her father, George Anthony, as a child) speculates that George assaulted or otherwise harmed Caylee while Casey was sleeping, drowned her, and hid the body while it decayed to cover up the evidence.
Verdict
Finally, after dozens of witnesses for the defense and prosecution and hundreds of pieces of evidence, on July 5, 2011, the jury found Anthony not guilty of first-degree murder and aggravated manslaughter of a child.
She was found guilty on charges related to lying to police during the initial investigations; however, because she had already been locked up since late 2008, she was credited with time served.
Nagging questions still lingered: why did Casey lie so much? Why did it take so long for Caylee’s disappearance to be reported? Why would someone choose to make the crime look like a homicide if it wasn’t?
But a simple fact remained: an overzealous prosecution, confident that Casey would earn herself the death sentence, pushed for a first-degree murder sentence–when they simply didn’t have the evidence to prove it.
Aftermath
If you are not already convinced of Casey’s guilt–or innocence–it is unlikely that you will ever get a decisive answer.
What we do know is that the vast majority of people were thoroughly convinced of Casey’s guilt–however, the jury was not.
The public perception of the Anthony case is what’s known as a wrongful exoneration–a situation in which a guilty, accused person is wrongfully allowed to go free by the court.
Wrongful exonerations are very dangerous: they decay the public’s trust in their legal system, creating social consequences for people involved in the case (such as defense lawyers and jurors) as well as an erosion of our commitment to the core principle of our legal justice system: innocent until proven guilty.
Many of the jurors involved in the Anthony trial were forced to go into hiding and conceal their identities as a result of the harassment they were subjected to. Some continued to stand by their verdict; others regretted that it allowed Casey to go free.
But the jury was simply doing their job, which was to assess whether there was sufficient evidence that Casey was guilty of premeditated, intentional murder.
Unfortunately, the only things that we have been able to prove definitively are that Casey Anthony was a liar and a negligent mother.
The aftermath of the Anthony trial thus raises a provocative question: is it better to risk putting an innocent person in jail or letting a guilty person go free?
Sources:
Bello, Marisol. “Casey Anthony Verdict Doesn’t Sit Well with Most Americans.” USA Today, 8 July 2011, web.archive.org/web/20110708030256/www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2011-07-07-casey-anthony-trial_n.htm. Accessed 11 July 2024.
Cloud, John. “How the Casey Anthony Murder Case Became the Social-Media Trial of the Century.” TIME, 16 June 2011, time.com/archive/6917499/how-the-casey-anthony-murder-case-became-the-social-media-trial-of-the-century/.
Farley, Frank. “Why We’re Obsessed with the Anthony Trial.” Www.cnn.com, 5 July 2011, edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/07/04/farley.casey.anthony.trial/index.html. Accessed 11 July 2024.
Hare, Breeanna. ““What Really Happened?”: The Casey Anthony Case 10 Years Later.” CNN, 30 June 2018, edition.cnn.com/2018/06/29/us/casey-anthony-10-years-later/index.html.
Wikipedia Contributors. “Death of Caylee Anthony.”Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 27 Mar. 2019, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Caylee_Anthony.
This raises a very important question about false positives and false negatives in sentencing. There is an underlying set of questions too: what is the purpose of incarceration? How is an innocent person affected by a wrongful conviction? Are wrongfully exonerated people more likely to reoffend?
The discussion about evidence was also really intriguing. What kinds of evidence are used? How does the prosecution and defense utilize them? Which are given primacy, authority, legitimacy? How do juries interpret such evidence?