Features
Justice in 140 characters or less
BY MATT WALKER
The hottest news story of the summer was undoubtedly the Casey Anthony trial. A young mother accused of murdering her 2-year-old daughter; a family meltdown on our television screens in real time. While America watched their every move, University of Florida Levin College of Law alumni filled key roles on both the prosecution and the defense teams. These officers of the court were well-aware of the stakes for justice and for the accused, but none of them predicted the avalanche of public attention once the case went to trial.
As Jeff Ashton (JD 80) stands up from the prosecution table to approach the witness, a gallery full of journalists barely look up from their cell phones or iPads, their necks arched as they tap at touchscreens (physical keyboards weren’t allowed in the courtroom). They are updating Twitter feeds and live blogs with minute details of the trial. On the 23rd floor of the Orange County Courthouse, it’s the O.J. trial for the Tweet Generation. Get your verdict in 140 characters or less.
Ashton, assistant state attorney for the 9th Judicial Circuit of Florida and assistant prosecutor in the Anthony case, dives into a legal sparring match with defense team member Dorothy Clay Sims (JD 81). The two Gators go head to head as Sims seeks to establish the credibility of the witness, while Ashton objects at every turn in an attempt to undercut his expertise. Anthony sits motionless and expressionless at the defense table, staring straight ahead. Next to Anthony, her attorney Jose Baez leans in to confer with co-counsel Cheney Mason (JD 70).
Meanwhile, Lawson Lamar (JD 72), state attorney for the 9th Circuit, remained mostly out of sight. As the officeholder, he was ultimately responsible for the prosecution but stayed in the background to provide guidance for Ashton and prosecutor Linda Drane Burdick. UF Law Adjunct Professor Bernard Raum served as a forensic evidence consultant to the prosecution, while Ann Finnell (JD 78) was a key member of the defense team during jury selection and for the penalty phase.
It was the trial of our young century, and UF Law was at the heart of it — from the alumni working the trial to the expert faculty members who helped the media understand the legal twists and turns unfolding in the courtroom. It was a trial set apart from all that came before it, a media maelstrom fueled by emerging communication technologies and a case study in the changing world of news consumption.
While it may look like a twist of fate that so many UF alumni and faculty filled so many key roles in this highest of high-profile national cases, UF Law Professor Amy Mashburn suggested otherwise. She pointed out that it’s not uncommon for UF Law alumni to be thrust into the spotlight in Florida.
“Thanks to the state’s large population and its pivotal role in law, politics and media, Florida often becomes the venue for high-profile or landmark legal issues,” Mashburn said. “So UF Law alumni wind up in leadership and high-profile roles.”
RECRUITING EXPERIENCE
Soon after he took on Casey Anthony as a client, Baez began calling Mason on the phone — out of the blue — to ask his legal advice. Mason said he was glad to help.
“I can remember as a young lawyer, me being on the receiving end,” Mason said. “I had no problem at all asking other lawyers I met, older lawyers, about things that I did not know.”
When Baez’s phone calls evolved into more and more frequent visits to Mason’s office, Mason finally asked, “What are you trying to do? You’re trying to get me to try this case with you?”
The answer was yes.
Mason, who has handled a number of high-profile cases throughout his 40-year career in Orlando, said he thought long and hard before committing to assist Baez. He knew it would mean dedicating a lot of time and money. But he didn’t envision the coming media frenzy.
“Nothing compared to this,” Mason said. “No one could have predicted or expected the depth of (coverage of) this case or the emotion that it generated.”
“There was more media of different types by a substantial margin in this case than there was in O.J. Simpson,” Mason said in a phone interview. “But the reason for that was technology; they didn’t have all that Twitter and stuff and whatever you call it back then.”
Sims — who was asked to join the defense team after Mason and Baez saw her present at a “Death is Different” conference in Orlando — was also a bit surprised by the media coverage.
And on the other side, Ashton, who recently retired from the state attorney’s office after 30 years, had words strikingly similar to Mason’s.
“Nothing compared to this, but I don’t really think anyone had ever handled anything that compared to this in terms of scope,” Ashton said. “I don’t think any of us could have anticipated what it would turn into, particularly at the trial.”
OLD MEDIA, NEW MEDIA AND
SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN
What did it turn into?
On the afternoon of the verdict, the No. 1 worldwide Twitter trend was: Not Guilty.
But for traditional media it was not as important as it might have seemed at the time. The online news site The Daily Beast found that the Anthony trial ranked as only the 26th biggest trial of the last 20 years based on mentions in newspapers, magazine and nightly news programs. The Simpson trial topped the list. The second biggest trial? Martha Stewart. The ranking did not factor in newer innovations in media consumption, including social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. And without a system like TV’s Nielsen ratings in place for social media, it’s difficult to know the true depth and breadth of coverage of the Anthony trial.
The Simpson trial had almost 1,200 credentialed reporters covering the case, while the Anthony trial had a little over 600. On the other hand, according to the Pew Research Center’s State of the News Media 2011 report, the number of newspapers and newspaper circulation have been on a steady decline over the past two decades.
At the same time the popularity of social media has exploded. Twitter had gone from 5,000 Tweets per day in 2007, according to The Daily Telegraph, to about 65 million Tweets per day in June. That’s 750 Tweets per second.
When the verdict came down not guilty on all counts except misleading law enforcement, the reaction from the general public was outrage. Facebook posts opposed to the verdict accumulated at a rate of at least 10 per second, according to All Facebook, a website that monitors Facebook activity.
Similarly, the top trending topics on Twitter that afternoon revolved around the Anthony verdict and according to Mashable, Akami — a website that monitors Internet traffic — reported a spike from 2 million news site page views to more than 3.2 million per minute when the verdict was announced.
The way people consume news is changing.
Yet the presence of the traditional media was very much felt by the attorneys.
“I would say the toughest part of this case was having to be subjected to the incompetence of the news media every single day,” Mason said. “They would report on the news things that clearly did not happen in the courtroom — that they made up — or if they did happen, they convoluted the report as to not really resemble it.”
Mason told Baez early on in the case, “No more press interviews.”
On the prosecution side, Ashton said the media circus made it more difficult selecting a jury — eventually chosen from Pinellas County residents instead of Orange County ones — but it didn’t have much impact on the trial itself.
Lamar, the state attorney, said his office never speaks to the media until the end of a trial.
“It is our policy not to discuss the facts of cases until the jury is back and the defendant is sentenced,” he said. “We think that the defendant’s day in court should not be prejudiced by some prosecutor crowing about the quality of their evidence and the guilt of the defendant.”
WHY ALL THE COMMOTION?
The strong emotional reactions the Casey Anthony case garnered from people throughout the country begs the question, why? Unfortunately, homicide — even child homicide — is not that uncommon. As the Casey Anthony trial continued on the 23rd floor, several floors below actor Billy Bob Thornton’s daughter was on trial for first-degree murder in the death of a friend’s 1-year-old daughter. She was eventually convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
So what set the Anthony trial apart from the rest?
“To be quite blunt about it, what they had going in this particular case is the defendant was an attractive young lady and that goes against the stereotype of what a criminal is,” said George “Bob” Dekle, a legal skills professor at UF Law. “You’ve got a truly innocent victim and an attractive suspect, and you had some ingredients there that the media could conjure with, which they did.”
UF Law Professors Dekle, Jennifer Zedalis (JD 84) and Michael Seigel, were consulted and interviewed regularly by various media on the Anthony trial.
Seigel, director of UF’s Criminal Justice Center, followed the Anthony trial closely. In addition to being quoted on National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” he served as a behind the scenes legal adviser for ABC News.
“It pulls at some very strong emotions in people when it’s a mother accused of killing her own child,” Seigel said. “And then it was a very, very troubled family. I mean this whole family, the relationships between the Anthonys and among the Anthonys was problematic, so I think that drew a lot of interest.”
From a legal standpoint, Seigel pointed out that the Anthony trial did have at least one unique aspect: air as evidence.
“That was a huge topic,” Seigel said. The fact that Judge Belvin Perry allowed it to be presented as evidence was a significant event, “given that the standard for the admission of novel scientific evidence is still in contention to some degree.”
The air, which was collected from the trunk of Casey Anthony’s car, was said to reveal the presence of decomposition. It was the first U.S. trial to allow such evidence.
For Ashton, whose main focus for the prosecution was in forensic evidence, it wasn’t the first time he was involved in introducing a never-before-used type of evidence in a criminal trial. In 1988, Ashton was the first prosecutor to present a case, and get a conviction, based on DNA evidence. He acknowledges that the air-as-evidence approach was a unique tactic, but he never had any notion of pioneering a new revolution in forensic evidence.
“This particular type of evidence is not going to be like DNA, where it’s going to alter the forensic universe, but it was an interesting application of science,” he said.
THE VERDICT
When Anthony was found not guilty on all charges related to the death of her daugther, Caylee, and guilty only of misleading law enforcement officials, it fueled outrage in the general public. The reaction from the legal community was a little different.“Was I surprised? No,” said Zedalis, a UF Law legal skills professor. “I said the day the verdict came out, nothing surprises me. … We’re not sitting in the room every day, eyeballing the witnesses, scrutinizing the evidence up close. We’re not in that jury room actually looking at the exhibits and the evidence and thinking about the testimony and deliberating.”
Seigel said he was initially surprised that there wasn’t a lesser conviction of manslaughter, but in hindsight he could understand the jury’s verdict.
“The prosecution was banking on the credibility of the mother and the father and they were not very credible witnesses, and you know, you don’t have control over that as a prosecutor,” Seigel said.
Ashton put the jury’s decision in perspective.
“I was quite shocked, quite shocked,” Ashton said. “Ultimately, as a lawyer you have to respect the jury’s verdict and that’s sort of the position I’ve taken.”
Ashton, whose book about his experiences in the trial, Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony, was published in November, said all the publicity and commentary surrounding the Anthony case has an upside.
“It was good in that a lot of people actually got to see how the system works from soup to nuts,” he said. “I hope people have a better understanding of how it works and that people can see that the verdicts don’t always go the way you want, but that’s the beauty of the system.”
Commenting is closed for this article.
