Today is the third week of the Casey Anthony trial, and the third week of the state's case against Casey Anthony (Florida v. Casey Anthony 2011). Like most murder trials, this is a circumstantial case. In other words, no witnesses, no murder weapon, and no cause of death by the M.E., other than "manner, homicide", as Caylee's body had been in the elements for quite some time. When manner of death is known, and it generally is in a murder (i.e., blunt force trauma? drugs? Gunshot wound?) the police investigation will focus on finding either the murder weapon itself or even a link to the type of weapon. They might not find the poison or the baseball bat, but was she seen buying the ingredients for the poison, was she known to possess a baseball bat which has mysteriously disappeared?
Manner of death also allows the prosecution to offer a theory of the crime that within the timeline or opportunity. Without any of that the prosecution has to find a way to link Casey Anthony to daughter Caylee's deceased body. Their evidence consists of, the smell in the trunk of Casey's Sunfire identified by several witnesses as the smell of human decomposition, and a single hair probably belonging to Caylee, that has the appearance of a hair from a decomposing body (specifically a dark band or discoloration near the root of the hair.) However even the expert witness, from the FBI forensic lab, cannot say with total certainty that the hair did come from Caylee's decomposing body. There could be other explanations.
So that leaves the smell in the trunk. There were five witnesses who testified that the car smelled of decomp, four of whom have experience detecting this highly unique smell. Wanting more definitive evidence of a decomposing body in Casey's car, the state called Dr. Arpad Vass of the Oak Ridge Research Lab in Tennessee to testify that there was scientific proof that this odor was in fact decomposition. Using an entirely new methodology which he invented, Dr. Vass collected air samples from the trunk and tested those samples using this methodology, and thus "proving" that the odor in Casey's car was in fact from human remains and not, say, garbage.
Because this science had never before been used at trial, and because Dr. Vass is the only expert to use this science, the defense has no opportunity to challenge it. So Jose Baez objected strenuously to Dr. Vass's testimony, or specifically, the science itself. He did not want evidence presented as scientific that may not truly meet that standard. I think it was crucial for Jose Baez to challenge this new science, strenuously, that he did. Most of Monday consisted of Mr. Baez objecting to Dr. Vass' direct testimony in which he explained his technique and stated that according to this method, he could be scientifically certain that a dead body was in Casey' car.
In Jose Baez's cross examination, he made clear that Dr. Vass was neither a chemist or physicist, and also that Dr. Vass would profit financially -- and perhaps by reputation, if his science was used successfully in a criminal trial.
Personally, I thought a briefer and more dismissive cross examination-- something along the lines of, 1) So this science has never been used?; 2) you aren't a chemist; 3) You can't prove a link to a specific body (like that of Caylee Anthony, and a few more questions of that nature and stop -- I think Jose may have lent more credence to this "proof" of decomposition than he needed to, since it wasn't a direct link to Caylee, and since the car was out of Casey's possession for several days so others has access to that trunk and car.
All that aside, what I can't get out of my mind is Jose Baez's opening in which he claims that Caylee drowned on June 16, 2008, in the family pool, that George Anthony, a retired police officer, held Caylee's lifeless body in his arms, and that he himself covered up the crime and disposed of the body. It seems so clear that George Anthony was desperate to find his granddaughter during the period of time the defense has said he had to have known she was dead. In addition, he clearly seems to be a man who would not allow his daughter to take the rap for him, certainly not be executed, nor a man who would allow his wife to suffer unnecessarily, for months, agonizing over where her granddaughter's body was.
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Most of it was spent trying to introduce a new kind of science, developed at Oak Ridge Laboratories by Dr. Vass. that would be able to
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