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that the defence was successful because they argued that the prosecution had not made its own case rather than because they reconstructed the story as an accidental death.
The strategies used by the prosecution and the defence is one explanation for the not guilty verdicts in the trial of Casey Anthony. However, a full explanation for the outcome of this case, and indeed any other, is unlikely to involve only one factor. Several other possible explanations have been off ered by commentators. For example, Judge Strickland (the original judge in the trial who removed himself following the defence’s claim that he was biased against Casey Anthony (Cuevas- Nazario and Karas, 2010)) said, ‘I try to think of why it occurred and I’m still not sure’ (Strickland, 2012). Both he and Judge Perry praised the prosecution attorneys for the case they made against her. Explanations for what allegedly ‘went wrong’ for the prosecution range from jurors’ misunderstanding of the nature of circumstantial evidence and reasonable doubt ( Strickland, 2012) through to the eff ect of pretrial publicity (Moran, 2019) to the defendant’s life being at stake because of the possible imposition of the death penalty if found guilty of fi rst- degree murder ( Ashton, 2012 ). Judge Perry stated, ‘All the defence had to do was create that reasonable doubt and that’s what they did’ ( Perry, 2013) , although he could not precisely know what reasonable doubt the jurors would have identifi ed. Finally, other sociological perspectives discussed in this book may shine a light on other explanations for Anthony’s acquittal. In Chapter 2 we will draw on the perspective of storytelling in the courtroom and its infl uence on trial outcomes. Perhaps one explanation for Anthony’s acquittal is that the prosecution were not able to tell a good story that aligned with their version of events. That is, the prosecution’s argument that Anthony murdered her daughter was not well supported by their narrative that she was a poor and negligent mother because they did not have the evidence to suggest she was such a parent. Additionally, in Chapter 6 we will discuss the infl uence on case outcomes of the persuasive skills of the prosecution and defence. For example, Anthony’s defence lawyer Baez was perhaps a more skilled orator than Ashton; that is, his style and use of language were more persuasive to the jury. As you read those and other chapters in this book, you may also identify other factors of possible signifi cance for understanding the outcome of Casey Anthony’s trial.
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Bennett and Feldman’s 1981 book Reconstructing Reality in the Courtroom has recently come back into print and you can buy it easily and quite cheaply. As well as reading more about the requisites for establishing guilt, the book is also useful for Chapter 2 when we cover storytelling in the courtroom and Chapter 6 when we examine rhetoric and persuasion in the courtroom. Both
Jeff Ashton (prosecutor) and Jose Baez (defence attorney) have written books about the case and they are useful to compare and contrast because one constructs Casey’s guilt ( Ashton, 2012 ) and the other constructs her innocence ( Baez and Golenbock, 2013 ).
Notes
1 Juror number 2 during an interview with Tampa Bay Times following the verdict (Thalji, 2011). 2 An alternate juror is an additional member of the public selected to sit on the jury for a trial, who listens to the evidence just as the jurors do. If a member of the jury cannot continue in the trial (because of illness, for instance) the alternate juror is substituted in order to maintain a total of 12 members.
