ORLANDO – Mother Casey Anthony has been found not guilty of killing her two-year-old daughter in a case that captivated the US as it played out on national television from the moment the toddler was reported missing three years ago.
Anthony (25) wept as the judge read the verdict, which jurors reached after less than 11 hours of deliberation over two days. She was charged with first-degree murder, which could have brought the death penalty if she had been convicted.
Instead, she was convicted of only four counts of lying to investigators looking into the June 2008 disappearance of her daughter, Caylee.
The toddler’s body was found in the woods six months later and a medical examiner was never able to determine how she died.
Anthony will be sentenced by the judge in Orlando, Florida, tomorrow and could receive up to a year in jail for each lying count.
Anthony’s lawyers claimed that the toddler drowned accidentally in the family swimming pool, and that her seemingly carefree mother was hiding emotional distress caused by sexual abuse by her father.
Prosecutors contended that Caylee was suffocated with duct tape by a mother who loved to party, tattooed herself with the Italian words for “beautiful life” in the month her daughter was missing, and crafted elaborate lies to mislead everyone from investigators to her own parents.
Captivated observers camped outside the courthouse to jockey for seats in the courtroom.
Because the case got so much media attention in Orlando, jurors were brought in from the Tampa Bay area and sequestered for the entire trial.
Anthony did not take the stand during the trial, which started in mid-May.
Anthony’s lawyer, Jose Baez, conceded that his client had told elaborate lies and invented imaginary friends and even a fake father for Caylee, but he said that did not mean she killed her daughter.
“They throw enough against the wall and see what sticks,” Mr Baez said of prosecutors during closing arguments. “That is what they’re doing . . . right down to the cause of death.”
Mr Baez tried to convince jurors that the toddler accidentally drowned in the family swimming pool and that when Anthony panicked, her father, a former police officer, decided to make the death look like a murder by putting duct tape on the girl’s mouth and dumping the body in woods.
They said Anthony’s apparently carefree life hid distress caused by sexual abuse by her father. Anthony’s father denied both the cover-up and abuse claims. The prosecution called those claims “absurd”, saying no one makes an accident look like a murder.
Prosecutors hammered on the lies Anthony, then 22, told from June 16th, 2008, when her daughter was last seen, and a month later when sheriff’s investigators were notified.
Those include the single mother telling her parents she could not produce Caylee because she was with a nanny named Zanny – a woman who does not exist; that she and her daughter were spending time in Jacksonville, Florida, with a rich boyfriend who does not exist; and that Zanny had been taken to hospital after an out-of-town road crash and they were spending time with her. – (AP)