Let’s just say that if you were on trial and could ask each potential juror if he thought Nancy Grace is just and fair-minded, you would do best to remove any who answered in the affirmative.
I think that would be illegal. The juror would in fact, become a witness if that happened and that might lead to a mistrial. One of the legal consultants for the news explained why such a thing is not allowed.
You mean if the juror knows something that puts him at odds with other jurors that he can’t express it ?
Yeah, after looking at the prosecution’s closing, Casey’s totally responsible. I think the one observation of Casey in this whole thing is, since her mother reported the missing car/child, how long could Casey have gone on with the “she’s with the nanny” act in other circumstances?
A missing kid drives families completely bonkers from the get go. Her cockamamie stories only makes her look more guilty.
In fact, the defense’s whole “she was molested!” idea of defense certainly WAS used to confuse the jury. What was that supposed to do? Make people think, “oh, if she was molested, let her go” kind of thing?
I still don’t know if Caylee was killed on purpose. That’s what sucks about these cases. We never get to know the whole, damn thing.
That Casey is responsible is something that 95%+ of people can agree on, but how responsible is the real question. The possible charges she can be convicted on run the gamut from THE most serious to almost inconsequential.
For me, I don’t see any first degree murder evidence. Chloroform, duct tape, whatever. Casey is certainly fully responsible for the welfare of Caylee. Somehow Caylee died.
Still, I voted in the poll as guilty on all counts because I think that’s the way the jury will lean. If they do convict on everything, I don’t see how the death penalty would be fair. If Caylee’s body was found a couple days after, we’d have all the answers we need to sentence properly. Still no idea how she really died. We don’t even know if it WAS a murder. This is just nuts.
I’ll bet one simolean the jury is back tomorrow with verdict.
Here are the Florida jury forms, if anyone’s curious. Looking at them, I may have to go with the third choice: First Degree Manslaughter.
Meh. Depends what I had for breakfast that day, I suppose. A good omelet with fruit on the side might make me go towards 2nd degree manslaughter. 
Apparently it would make him a witness.
From what I understand, that’s the reason for the argument against letting the jurors smell the air in the can. If one of them says, “I’ve smelled dead bodies and they don’t smell like that”, they’re a witness. Their opinion is given more weight than other jurors’ opinions. Or something like that.
Seems like it would be hard to enforce – keeping personal experience outside of deliberations. There are a lot of aspects of the case that jurors will be familiar with.
I don’t buy the chloroform stuff either, but it’s hard to believe the state didn’t realize they were wrong. Same with the emphasis on “neck breaking”. I read somewhere (maybe here) that one of Casey’s friends was in a skateboarding group called “Neck Breakers”.
Too much emphasis on the chloroform but without it, wouldn’t the state be alleging that Casey duct-taped Caylee’s mouth without putting her to sleep first? Maybe they couldn’t bring themselves to go there.
She can be convicted of lesser included crimes, but they’re not in the poll. I’m going with second degree felony murder.
Yeah, I would find it very tough to be on that jury. I would tend to lean towards manslaughter as a compromise between the lack of concrete evidence and the highly suspicious circumstantial evidence. But in order to be 100% honest and determined to follow the letter of the law, I would have to vote not guilty except for 4 counts of lying to police, since the prosecution did not PROVE anything else beyond a reasonable doubt.
And since that jury is comprised of vastly different people, they probably will be hung on all but the minor charges. But one thing if for certain, it’s gonna be very long and drawn out, and the media is going to absolutely freak the fuck out no matter what the result.
^^ Yeah. Maybe we’ll finally see Nancy Grace’s head pop off. 
I take it that she’s exempt from any jury duty ever, no?
I agree with most of this, however, I don’t think Casey can accept responsibility for anything. At all. And because of that, the defense had to use her nonsensical story. If she could have taken even a little bit of blame, I think she’d be in a much better position, too.
I do wonder, though, why do you believe the duct tape being the murder weapon is a weak assertion? I find it not only plausible, but probable.
I voted guilty on all counts. And I hope I’m right, because I really believe she killed Caylee, and deserves to spend the rest of her life in prison. (I’m not big on the death penalty.)
This is my problem with the defense’s case. If you take every bit of circumstantial evidence, they have pat little excuse for all of them, but when you take them all in totality, it points to guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Not any possible doubt, but beyond a reasonable one.
Good point. Forest and trees, like the talking heads were nattering on about all day. Patches of a quilt or a knitted blanket was another one.
It’s just not reasonable to believe, like Burdick said, that someone would fake a kidnapping to cover up an accident. She might panic for a few hours, or a day or two, but to let it go this far? Nuh uh.
And her story is that she and her dad were at the house when Caylee accidentally drowned in the pool. Now, instead of calling the authorities (assuming that maybe they were drunk or some other reason that would get them criminally charged for an accident) George tells her to keep her yap shut and that he will make it look like a kidnapping.
First, as a former LEO, he’s got to know that this is horrible strategy. Second, I’ve lived in Florida. You could take her body out in the Everglades and it would be gator food within a day. The body would never be found. Third, he will concoct a plausible story for the disappearance. If it was a kidnapping, don’t you call the cops THAT DAY?
Did he tell her to make up a story about a fake nanny? Did he not think that his wife would start wondering where her granddaughter was? Being an ex-LEO, he would have to let her in on the plot to keep her from doing what she did: Calling the cops. He would have to know that a child missing for a month is not a plausible kidnapping story when it isn’t reported. He would know that they would find that the nanny didn’t exist.
If he involves himself to that extent, again to protect against an almost nothing charge in an accidental death, he risks getting charged with a much more heinous crime, and doesn’t even tell Casey how to handle it and what lies to say?
I don’t buy it for a minute. For whatever problems that guy had, he didn’t have anything to do with this death. Not only does it make zero sense, there is also zero evidence that it happened. The only person who could have told the story is Casey and she would have been caught in so many lies that the jury would have put the needle in her arm right there on the witness stand.
Honestly, most of the posters here are very intelligent, but reasonable doubt does not equal beyond all possible twisted unlikely scenarios that drift beyond scenarios that have reasonable explanations.
If I am wrong in my analysis, please lay out an alternate scenario that complies with the defense’s version.
The nanny story, as well as the imaginary job and co-workers had been going on for years; it did not come about after the disappearance.
I’ll make up a story for ya:
The sex abuse story was true. George had also been abusing the baby. On that morning the little girl, who was beginning to talk, startled him by saying something like “Tell Mommy I suck it good.”
He panics. Casey was eight when he started with her so he could keep her quiet by threatening her but such a young girl might not understand threats enough to keep quiet. He holds the naked little girl under the water until she stops breathing but hears the door open before he is able to hide her.
He blames and threatens Casey and tells her “Get lost. I’ll take care of this.” She does as she has always done – she listens to Daddy. He dresses the kid in clothes that no longer fit, stuffs her in a trash bag and seals the bag with duct tape – that’s what he does with dead things. He’s an ex-cop, so he makes sure there are no fingerprints, fibers, DNA, etc. on the goods.
He dumps the bag in a place where he figures it will be found quickly, but a month goes by. Casey is telling lies, covering up, just like she always has. She flakes out and gets her car towed. When George goes to pick up the car he smells a terrible stench and an idea strikes him. He can get rid of his other problem, too – nobody is going to believe Casey. He says “It smells like a dead body in the trunk.” to the tow truck guy. They open the trunk and tow truck guy says “There’s your smell.” and throws out the bag of garbage Casey had forgotten to drop in the dumpster on the way out of her boyfriend’s apartment complex.
George goes home and tells Cindy the car smelled like a dead body. Cindy calls the cops and repeats the dead body smell story. Cops take Casey in and George runs right down to the station and tells even more cops about the dead body smell. The cops who come to pick up the car don’t smell it, though.
Casey gets out on bail. George, the ex-cop, knows that if there is a gun in the house Casey will be taken back to jail. George goes out and buys a gun.
The months go by with no body. George hires some goof ball private investigators and makes arrangements for a psychic to tell them where to find the bag but they mess it up. Finally the meter reader finds the decomposing bag of bones. The bag was falling apart and the tape had gotten stuck in the hair, so the tape was laying right next to the skull.
TV personality medical examiner rushes back from a trip to take charge of a case she can turn into a lot of publicity. She announces that the tape was used to kill the child, based mainly on the fact that it made for a lot of publicity. Publicity seeking DA agrees and hires all the screwball paid experts he can find because the cops and the FBI don’t find any actual evidence of a murder.
George comes under fire, one of his dirty little secrets is going to be exposed. He takes a few pills, drinks a beer, and writes a dramatic ‘suicide’ note that clears everyone but Casey. He gets on the stand, puts out some phony tears, says things that implicate Casey but don’t match what the rest of his family says. “Hey, she was the one with the baby. One and one is two.” He walks off the stand, making the motion of washing his hands toward his daughter. End of story.
I could make up a lot more stories that fit the evidence at least as well as the official state theory.
While you made everything “fit”, honestly, none of that is as plausible as:
Casey didn’t want to be bothered with a kid and, in a fit of partying and negligence, [somehow] caused the child’s death. She ditched the body and then told a lot of lies to try and talk her way out of it, because lying and talking her way out of things is what she always does. She continued to lie and tried to shift the blame elsewhere in a borderline sociopathic way, because she’s a borderline sociopath.
My story fits all the known facts and, unlike your story, doesn’t require us to take Casey’s word about the molestation or anything else. I wouldn’t kill a flea on Casey Anthony’s word.
It’s probably just that simple.
I know nothing about this case. I voted guilty because if she’s found innocent we’ll be hearing about her for years to come.
For lots of reasons, some large, some small. But let me state from the outset that I don’t claim to know what happened, I just find certain scenarios to be very unlikely.
First of all, death by duct tape doesn’t fit with the theory that Casey was drugging/restraining Caylee but didn’t intend to kill her. The tape would have become impossibly stuck in her hair and wouldn’t have been practical to remove after she was done getting her party on. Additionally, no such drugs/chloroform were found anywhere, including in toxicological screenings of Caylee’s remains.
So then, what about using the tape as the weapon in an intentional premeditated murder? On the one hand the prosecution wants you to believe that Casey was smart and planned this for some time, even supposedly researching elaborate methods on the internet. On the other hand, she ends up using duct tape to do the deed? The prosecution trotted out chloroform as being used prior to the tape coup-de-grace, the only problem is there is no credible evidence of chloroform whatsoever. There’s at least 1000 more simple, effective, fool-proof, obvious and just plain better and more pleasant? ways to kill your own child than using duct tape. And contrary to what the movies might have you believe, taping someone’s mouth shut is just not that effective. People have teeth, wet tongues, lips, and jaws they can move to displace any tape blocking their ability to breathe or talk. If you plan to kill someone, particularly your own child, I find it very hard to believe someone would choose duct tape. And if for some strange reason they did, I just don’t see leaving it on afterward.
So why the tape? I find two explanations for the tape more likely, both being applied post-mortem. First would be a crude attempt at making it look like a kidnapping, duct taped mouths being so de rigueur in movie kidnappings. The other possibility, (and this is VERY gross and sad) was that the tape was used in an attempt to stop the flow of bodily fluids and the smell from decomposition.
Both the coroner and prosecution said that there is no reason except murder for the tape to be there, which was the ONLY way they could declare the death a homicide and (even though cause of death is unknown) charge Casey Anthony with murder. I just gave two possible reasons, both of which are more plausible than duct tape as premeditated murder weapon, IMO.
Okay. So wouldn’t you expect George, the ex cop to tell her to sit her down and lay out a plan of how to act? Knowing that she is a flake would you just trust her to wing it and be certain that she won’t tell the wrong lie or otherwise say something stupid that would get them caught?
The rest of your story is fanciful, but IMHO not a reasonable reading of the evidence that is before the jury. There is only Casey’s, well her lawyer’s word that George molested her. There is zero evidence, circumstantial or otherwise, of that. And your story has him molesting Caylee as well? And then drowning her because the toddler would rat him out?
Again, the standard is a reasonable doubt, not “can we concoct ANY other story, no matter how far fetched, that would fit the facts?”