Casey Anthony Quotes

I feel like if I say anything bad about my pregnancy, suddenly I’m Casey Anthony.” “That’s crazy,” I say. “You’re way prettier.

Those who claim the right to that arrogance without accomplishments to back it up deserve to be exposed.

Lies are like muscles: it takes practice to make them strong.

As I look back on it, I understand that the jury was sequestered and it was a long trial, but they were a rather high-maintenance bunch. There seemed to be a lot of thought and discussion about what entertainment they wanted, which movies they wanted to watch, and which restaurants they wanted to go to. Yet, as we would learn later, when it came time to deliberate, they never asked a single question about the evidence.

Lies are like muscles: it takes practice to make them strong. Casey Anthony had clearly been giving hers a lot of exercise.

Casey never should have disclosed such extremely sensitive information, but his cocaine addiction obviously impaired his judgment.

Ultimately, it is this piece of the jury’s decision that I absolutely cannot understand: how could they disregard so much evidence showing that Casey had played a large role in Caylee’s death? Looking through the testimonies that we presented at trial, one thing that seems quite apparent is that, either through her own deliberate actions or through some kind of negligence, Casey was involved in her daughter’s death. There is simply too much evidence tying Caylee’s dead body to the car Casey was driving for me to believe that Casey herself was completely uninvolved.

I noticed that the defense team had lowered Casey’s adjustable chair more than was normal for a person of Casey’s height. Only her head and shoulders were visible above the table. I was sure it was deliberately staged to make her appear smaller and meeker than she was. But wouldn’t the jury see through those ploys? How smart do you have to be to know you are being played?

After George was dismissed, the jury had two questions of its own for Judge Perry. They wanted to know which twelve of the fifteen jurors would deliberate the case and which three were alternates. Would it be the first twelve and the alternates were the last three, or would the order be mixed up? The other question was, Did the alternates get to go home when the jury deliberated? Day Three of the trial and they were already talking about wanting to go home—not a good sign.

My worst fears from jury selection manifested themselves in the verdict. This jury needed someone to tell them exactly how Caylee died. Piecing it together from circumstantial evidence was not good enough for them. They wanted the answers on a silver platter, but we didn’t have the evidence to serve it that way. It’s not just the verdict that tells me this, but also the manner in which it was reached. The fact that they didn’t request any materials to review. The fact that they didn’t have any questions for the judge. If the statements that the foreman of the jury made to the media are true, ten of these twelve jurors felt that ninety minutes of deliberation was sufficient to fully weigh, consider, and reject four weeks’ worth of testimony that we on the prosecution used to establish that this was first-degree murder. The rest of the thirteen hours of deliberation had been spent trying to convince the two holdout jurors of the decision.

The freedom to decide what is my own good is enshrined in Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”3 Freedom means, “Hands off, I’ve got this. I know what I want.” I’ll know I’m free when I get to decide what’s good for me, when every choice is a blank check of opportunity and possibility.

The judge also must behave like a little child, in order to make sense out of a senseless case.

Plato’s wisdom: It is better to suffer injustice than to do injustice.

As soon as the prosecution announced that it was going to seek the death penalty, all the amateur legal experts knew that I would need a death penalty expert to defend Casey because I wasn’t qualified to do so. You have to have tried two death penalty cases and you also have to have a certain amount of credits to be qualified. Most people who are charged with the death penalty are poor people, so unless you’re a veteran public defender, and really, almost a lifer in the public defenders’ office, chances are you’re not death penalty–qualified.

RBG’s image as a moderate was clinched in March 1993, in a speech she gave at New York University known as the Madison Lecture. Sweeping judicial opinions, she told the audience, packed with many of her old New York friends, were counterproductive. Popular movements and legislatures had to first spur social change, or else there would be a backlash to the courts stepping in. As case in point, RBG chose an opinion that was very personal to plenty of people listening: Roe v. Wade. The right had been aiming to overturn Roe for decades, and they’d gotten very close only months before the speech with Planned Parenthood v. Casey. Justices Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, and Sandra Day O’Connor had instead brokered a compromise, allowing states to put restrictions on abortion as long as they didn’t pose an “undue burden” on women—or ban it before viability. Neither side was thrilled, but Roe was safe, at least for the moment. Just as feminists had caught their breath, RBG declared that Roe itself was the problem. If only the court had acted more slowly, RBG said, and cut down one state law at a time the way she had gotten them to do with the jury and benefit cases. The justices could have been persuaded to build an architecture of women’s equality that could house reproductive freedom. She said the very boldness of Roe, striking down all abortion bans until viability, had “halted a political process that was moving in a reform direction and thereby, I believe, prolonged divisiveness and deferred stable settlement of the issue.” This analysis remains controversial among historians, who say the political process of abortion access had stalled before Roe. Meanwhile, the record shows that there was no overnight eruption after Roe. In 1975, two years after the decision, no senator asked Supreme Court nominee John Paul Stevens about abortion. But Republicans, some of whom had been pro-choice, soon learned that being the anti-abortion party promised gains. And even if the court had taken another path, women’s sexual liberation and autonomy might have still been profoundly unsettling. Still, RBG stuck to her guns, in the firm belief that lasting change is incremental. For the feminists and lawyers listening to her Madison Lecture, RBG’s argument felt like a betrayal. At dinner after the lecture, Burt Neuborne remembers, other feminists tore into their old friend. “They felt that Roe was so precarious, they were worried such an expression from Ruth would lead to it being overturned,” he recalls. Not long afterward, when New York senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan suggested to Clinton that RBG be elevated to the Supreme Court, the president responded, “The women are against her.” Ultimately, Erwin Griswold’s speech, with its comparison to Thurgood Marshall, helped convince Clinton otherwise. It was almost enough for RBG to forgive Griswold for everything else.

Not only did it make her look worse, it made the defense look as if they didn’t know what was in the best interests of their client. Jose Baez’s lack of experience was showing.

Cindy’s reply was “Well, she only did it once.

It was a lethally toxic codependent relationship. One person was skilled at lying to others, while the other was skilled at lying to herself.

The difficulty for prosecutors was that, unlike defense attorneys, we had to actually believe the theory we were arguing to the jury. Defense attorneys have an obligation to argue their clients' version of the facts or any alternate version of the facts that benefit their client. Their subjective belief in the truth of the version must be disregarded unless there is clear evidence that perjury has been committed. Prosecutors, however, can proceed only if they have a good-faith belief that the prosecution is warranted and that the material evidence on which it is based is true.

The word I always use in describing Jose is smarmy: somebody who is slick, underhanded, and doesn't shoot straight.

Justice is not just about what gets decided in the courtroom, it's about how we should go about our lives and respect others. And in the end, that's what it really means to remember Caylee.