CASE STUDIES OF FAMOUS TRIALS
to the defence (Ashton, 2012). Given the volume of pretrial publicity, it was considered that an impartial jury could not be found in Orange County (where the alleged crime had occurred), so a jury was selected from nearby Pinellas County instead. The jurors were taken to Orlando for the trial and ‘sequestered’ (isolated from the public and the media) for its duration. The trial began on 24 May 2011 and lasted for six weeks (Ashton, 2012).
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Establishing guilt: the prosecution’s strategy In criminal cases, the prosecution is under a legal obligation to prove the defendant’s guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. Social scientists Bennett and Feldman (1981) argued that the prosecution’s strategy is underpinned by presenting the evidence in the form of a story (see Chapter 2). That is, the jury compare and contrast the competing stories of the defence and the prosecution, and the story that is judged to be true or truer depends on how well organised, coherent and believable it is. The present chapter, however, is concerned not so much with the story as with the underlying strategies that support the prosecution’s story. We utilise the trial of Casey Anthony to illustrate how these strategies are employed, and importantly, how the manner in which they are employed may strengthen or weaken the prosecution’s case. The prosecution’s strategy focuses on a small set of categories that are the requisites for establishing guilt: presence, state of mind and action. Presence refers to the scene of the crime (thus showing that the defendant was situated at the scene of the crime at the time that the offence took place); state of mind refers to the defendant’s intention to commit the crime and in law is known as mens rea (the mental intent to carry out the crime); and action refers to the execution of the act that constituted the crime, and in law this is known as actus reus (whereby the prosecution must prove that the accused carried out the act) (Clarkson, 2005). Ideally, these requisites must be established by direct evidence: ‘Evidence which requires no mental process on the part of the tribunal of fact [the jury] in order to draw the conclusion sought by the proponent of the evidence’ (Murphy and Glover, 2009: 17). For example, the accused being chosen from an identity parade by someone who witnessed the crime, or the testimony of a witness claiming to have first-hand knowledge of the accused committing the crime both represent direct evidence. However, direct evidence may not be available in all cases and the law also accepts circumstantial evidence which ‘helps us indirectly establish a criminal intent or criminal act’ (Lippman, 2013: 117), or presence at the scene of the crime. Circumstantial evidence supports an inference. For example, a fingerprint of the accused found at a crime scene or the testimony of a witness claiming to have seen the accused near the scene of the crime (Murphy and Glover, 2009) are circumstantial indicators of presence, showing that the accused had the opportunity to 8
