Retired prosecutor aims at Anthony attorneys

ORLANDO, FLA. (AP) - A retired prosecutor from the Casey Anthony murder trial calls her lead attorney “smarmy” in a new book and says he didn’t think a jury would ever agree to the death penalty for the Florida mother, who was ultimately acquitted of killing her 2-year-old daughter.

Jeff Ashton writes in Tuesday’s “Imperfect Justice: Prosecuting Casey Anthony” that he would have been happier if the prosecution team had left the death penalty off the table. He also confirmed that toward the end of the trial, Anthony’s attorneys tried to persuade the 25-year-old to accept a plea deal but she refused to listen.

“Personally, I think I would have been happier if the death penalty had not been reintroduced into the case, even though I think on some level I think Casey may have deserved it,” Ashton said in the 324-page book. “Simply put, I just didn’t think the jury would go there.”

As it turns out, Anthony refusal to accept a deal paid off. Jurors in July acquitted her in the killing of her daughter, Caylee, and she was released from prison, though she is in hiding somewhere in Florida, serving probation for an unrelated check fraud case.

Ashton’s book is the first account written by one of the key players in the trial that captured the attention of the nation last summer. He retired soon after the trial ended.

In it, he takes direct aim at Anthony’s defense attorneys, specifically Jose Baez, whom he says he genuinely dislikes. He said Baez was careless with the facts, unmindful of deadlines and encouraged Anthony to be uncooperative with detectives searching for her daughter.

“There is an unearned air of arrogance about the man that is incredibly frustrating to witness,” Ashton writes. “The word I used in describing Jose is smarmy: somebody who is slick, underhanded and doesn’t shoot straight.”

Baez said in a statement that Ashton’s characterizations were false.

“Having read several of the comments Mr. Ashton makes in his new book, I am both surprised and somewhat disappointed he has chosen to attack me on a personal level,” Baez said. “Without going into specific detail, I will say only that many of his accusations are absolutely false.”

Ashton also writes an unflattering view of jurors. He wrote they seemed to give a lot of thought and discussion about which movies they wanted to watch or which restaurants to go to while they were sequestered. Yet no juror asked a single question about the evidence during deliberation.

“From the moment our jury had been fielded … we’d had concerns over their apparent absence of strong opinions as well as over the amount of effort they seemed willing to expend on this,” Ashton writes. “In retrospect, I think those concerns were justified.”

Three jurors gave television interviews immediately after the verdict, but they have since refused to talk to reporters about the case.

The book, for the first time, also discloses the results of two psychological evaluations taken of Anthony.

Two defense psychologists who did the evaluations never testified. But Anthony told the psychologists that she was sexually abused by her father, Ashton wrote.

As part of their defense, Anthony’s attorneys said Caylee drowned in the family swimming pool, and that her father, a former police officer, helped cover it up. Anthony’s partying and shopping during the month before her daughter was reported missing was caused in part by her father’s sexual abuse, according to the defense theory. Her father, George Anthony, repeatedly denied those claims in court and afterward.

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