ORLANDO, Fla.,None — Prosecutor Jeff Ashton calls Casey Anthony's accusation that her father George began molesting her when she was 8 years old, then eventually started raping her, "the nuclear lie."
Ashton called her lead attorney "smarmy" in the new book and
says he didn't think a jury would ever agree to the death penalty
for the Florida mother, who was ultimately acquitted of killing her
2-year-old daughter.
Jeff Ashton writes in Tuesday's "Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting
Casey Anthony" that he would have been happier if the prosecution
team had left the death penalty off the table. He also confirmed
that toward the end of the trial, Anthony's attorneys tried to
persuade the 25-year-old to accept a plea deal but she refused to
listen.
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"Personally, I think I would have been happier if the death
penalty had not been reintroduced into the case, even though I
think on some level I think Casey may have deserved it," Ashton
said in the 324-page book. "Simply put, I just didn't think the
jury would go there."
As it turns out, Casey's refusal to accept a deal paid off. Casey could have pleaded to second-degree murder for a 30-year sentence or to aggravated manslaughter on one condition.
"If the truth about how Caylee died justified that offense so that was where we would have required her to make an allocution which was truthful," Ashton said.
Ashton said attorney Cheney Mason told the court that Casey "Would not react or listen in any way. If he talked about it, she acted like he wasn't there."
Jurors in July acquitted Casey in the killing of her daughter,
Caylee, and she was released from prison, though she is in hiding
somewhere in Florida, serving probation for an unrelated check
fraud case.
Ashton's book is the first account written by one of the key
players in the trial that captured the attention of the nation last
summer. The 54-year-old career prosecutor retired as planned after
the trial, following 30 years of trying cases.
In it, he takes direct aim at Anthony's defense attorneys,
specifically Jose Baez, whom he says he genuinely dislikes. He said
Baez was careless with the facts, unmindful of deadlines and
encouraged Anthony to be uncooperative with detectives searching
for her daughter.
"There is an unearned air of arrogance about the man that is
incredibly frustrating to witness," Ashton writes. "The word I
used in describing Jose is smarmy: somebody who is slick,
underhanded and doesn't shoot straight."
Baez said in a statement that Ashton's characterizations were
false.
"Having read several of the comments Mr. Ashton makes in his
new book, I am both surprised and somewhat disappointed he has
chosen to attack me on a personal level," Baez said. "Without
going into specific detail, I will say only that many of his
accusations are absolutely false."
Ashton also displays an unflattering view of the jurors. He
wrote they seemed to give a lot of thought and discussion to which
movies they wanted to watch or which restaurants to go to while
they were sequestered. Yet no juror asked a single question about
the evidence during deliberation.
"From the moment our jury had been fielded ... we'd had
concerns over their apparent absence of strong opinions as well as
over the amount of effort they seemed willing to expend on this,"
Ashton writes. "In retrospect, I think those concerns were
justified."
Three jurors gave television interviews immediately after the
verdict, but they have since refused to talk to reporters about the
case.
Ashton said people who disagreed with the acquittal and still
think Anthony was guilty should leave her alone and ignore her, in
hopes she'll fade from the public memory.
"My advice to people who are angry about this is to ignore
Casey, and I hope that's what they do," he said on NBC's "Today"
show Tuesday.
"I hope that someday, and I know this probably won't happen,
the name Casey Anthony will invoke a `who's that?"'
The book, for the first time, also discloses the results of two
psychological evaluations taken of Anthony.
Two defense psychologists who did the evaluations never
testified. But Anthony told the psychologists that she was sexually
abused by her father, Ashton wrote.
As part of their defense, Anthony's attorneys said Caylee
drowned in the family swimming pool, and that her father, a former
police officer, helped cover it up. Anthony's partying and shopping
during the month before her daughter was reported missing was
caused in part by her father's sexual abuse, according to the
defense theory. Her father, George Anthony, repeatedly denied those
claims in court and afterward.
WFTV legal analyst Bill Sheaffer said the defense used its legal latitude in settling on a more believable story.
“The defense certainly was smart enough to recognize that dog ain't gonna hunt. We're not selling that to the jury,” Sheaffer said.
One psychologist expressed apprehension about his evaluation
being used to support that defense theory, Ashton writes,
especially since Anthony had scored in a normal range on a test
designed to discover mental disorders. The other psychologist gave
Anthony a battery of tests to diagnose stress from trauma such as
sexual molestation. The tests didn't support the theory that she
had been molested, Ashton writes.
Sheaffer said Casey's attitude seemed as if she was saying, "'You may not think that I can sell this story to the jury and the world, but I, Casey, believe that I can, through you, sell this story.'"
A few weeks before trial, prosecutors met with George Anthony,
and his wife, Cindy, to give them a heads-up about the molestation
accusations that the defense planned to use at trial.
"George looked like he had been crying, like someone had just
killed Caylee all over again," Ashton writes. "He was just
devastated."
More than six months after she disappeared, a meter reader found
Caylee's remains in a swampy, wooded area near where she lived with
her mother and grandparents. Ashton said in the book that law
enforcement and volunteers never examined that area until Roy Kronk
reported seeing the remains there in December 2008.
"In the end, Murphy's Law prevailed: everyone assumed that
someone else had searched there, but in fact no one actually had,"
Ashton writes. "Everyone, including law enforcement, assumed that
the most obvious place had to have been combed and given the all
clear -- which just proves the adage about what happens when you
assume. Everybody ends up looking like and ass and a nation spent
an extra four months searching around the country for a lost little
girl who was a quarter mile from home."
A spokesman for the Orange County Sheriff's Office, the lead
agency investigating Caylee's disappearance and death, said Monday
that pinpointing a place to search for the toddler was challenging.
"Mr. Ashton, as part of the prosecution team, was well aware of
the difficulties in establishing a starting point," Capt. Angelo
Nieves said. "Casey Anthony told numerous lies to law enforcement
throughout the investigation concerning her daughter's
whereabouts."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
WFTV
