Questions remain as prosecutors rest case against Casey Anthony

Associated Press

ORLANDO, Fla.

Prosecutors spent 19 days proving beyond any doubt that Casey Anthony is a liar who loves to party. But did they also prove that she murdered her 2-year-old daughter Caylee?

The prosecution rested its case Wednesday after introducing a wealth of circumstantial and forensic evidence that they say shows that the young single mother suffocated her daughter by wrapping duct tape around her head. They say she left the girl’s body in her car until it stank and then dumped it in the woods near the home she shared with her parents.

But there are holes. They have no witnesses who saw the killing. No one saw Anthony with the body. And because the body was so decomposed, there is no absolute proof that the child was suffocated, just the tape remnants on her skull. Caylee’s remains were found in December 2008, six months after the girl was last seen.

And while the prosecution used Anthony’s friends, parents and brother to show that she lied repeatedly before and after her child died, the witnesses also all agreed that she was a loving and doting mother. If convicted of first-degree murder, Anthony faces a possible death sentence.

“I think [the prosecutors] did as best they could with the evidence that they have,” said Leslie Garfield, a criminal law professor at Pace Law School in New York. “The problem is that all 12 jurors have to find a verdict unanimously beyond all reasonable doubt. So you wind up having a pretty heavy burden.”

And that’s what Anthony’s attorneys will bank on when they begin their case Thursday — but they also set a high bar for themselves.

In his opening statement, lead defense attorney Jose Baez said he will show that Caylee accidentally drowned in her grandparents’ above-ground swimming pool and that Casey freaked out.

He said Anthony’s father, a former police officer, made the death look like a murder and helped her dump the body. George Anthony adamantly denied the claim during his testimony, along with an accusation that he molested Casey as a child.

If the defense has no witnesses to back up their claims of a drowning and cover-up, many lawyers familiar with the case think Anthony, 25, will have to testify in her own defense, opening her up scathing cross-examination.

“That’s really risky,” Garfield said.

In her opening statement, lead prosecutor Linda Drane Burdick didn’t hide the central mystery of the case: “What happened to Caylee Marie Anthony?”

She and her assistants then methodically tried to answer that question, showing that Anthony had been living the life of a party girl before Caylee disappeared in June 2008 — and didn’t slow down until she was arrested weeks later.

They showed that Anthony, then 22, lied to her parents and detectives about working as a party planner at Universal Studios theme park. She also maintained that a nanny named Zanny had taken the child in several conversations with investigators — a vastly different explanation from the drowning story the defense is now using.