Casey Anthony Murder Trial: Day 33

Updated, 6:00
Scroll down to "Case Closed"

SIT AROUND AND WAIT!

Due to the unusual circumstances, I am posting the events of this morning early. I will be monitoring the situation and updating as events occur, if they do. Check back during the day!

Judge Belvin Perry appeared in the courtroom at 8:50 to hear Jose Baez again plead for the judge to reconsider his ruling for the Gentiva testimony. He pointed out to Perry that there were already some documents that have some of the information the prosecution already had.

Ms. Sims had a medical issue and will be in court shortly. She asked to speak to two of the state's computer experts. The defense contended that they are going to render new opinions not in reports and were unavailable to talk to Ms. Sims. The witnesses are Osborne and Stenger. Baez said he wanted Judge Perry to hold the state to the same standard that he held the defense to.

Baez also mentioned Dr. Goldberger and Dr. Warren were ready to testify. Again, he asked that all new opinions be proffered since there were no new reports.

Ms. Burdick stated that the witnesses from the Sheriff's offices were going to testify to things that Mrs. Anthony said during her testimony. Ms. Burdick said that the defense could speak to them now. Ms. Burdick said that she only heard of the desire to re-depose at 5:30 PM yesterday. She also told Mr. Baez what they would testify to, based on Mrs. Anthony's testimony. There was also an issue as to whether Mrs. Anthony could engage in a remote log-in to her work computer, and they had learned that she couldn’t.

Baez said it would take two days to do this research and he would have liked to have his computer people to look at it. The defense was not placed on notice and waited until their case was closed. He told Ms. Burdick it was in violation of Perry's order.

Judge Perry asked how much time he needed. Baez said he didn't know until he saw reports. Once he saw them, he could show it to his experts and see how long it would take.

Baez also said that Dr. Goldberger and Dr. Warren may also have new opinions.

Jeff Ashton said that Dr. Goldberger's opinion was given to the defense two years ago. It would go to refute Dr. Spitz' testimony concerning the sediment in the skull. Also, Goldberger is on the defense witness list.

Baez pointed out that he is not a forensic pathologist and can't testify to Dr. Spitz opinions.

Perry asked if he wanted to depose the witness. Baez went on pressing his case.

Jeff Ashton pointed out that Goldberger was only going to testify to the cranial wash, which was in his report. Baez said Goldberger never said what he found in his test. He's a toxicologist and cannot testify to that. He can't identify anything as organic matter. Baez argued he didn't open the skull and couldn't testify to that.

Baez was offered the balance of the morning to do the depositions. Perry said that if he wanted to do that, he could take this morning and they would be back tomorrow.

Perry made it clear that both sides had asked to have off tomorrow to prepare for closings. He said he will let the defense take the time and be back tomorrow and Sunday, and Monday, and Tuesday.

He also indicated that if it was a surprise to the defense, he would let them take the depositions, but he first wanted to see the reports to make sure the information was not there.

Jeff Ashton disagreed with Baez and said that he did the saline washes. Ashton indicated that it was not organic matter such as one would see from decomposition. Baez claimed the finding were not in the report.

Baez again couldn't say how much time he needed. Ashton said he'd pointed out the differences and the depositions would be short. Baez then said that Ashton was now admitting that there was new material and Jeff Ashton said, "NO, THERE WOULD NOT!"

Judge Perry said that the jury is sequestered. He said that they would recess on call whenever the defense was prepared.

Judge Perry also asked about a jury instruction about Dr. Rodriguez

So, at this point, we are all sitting around and waiting!.

Case Closed!

Finally, about 1:30 PM, the prosecution began its rebuttal case.

The first witness was John Camperlengo, the Chief Compliance Officer and General Counsel of Gentiva. He was questioned by Linda Burdick.

They discussed the company policy on retention of e-mails. There were a number of technical questions about how the records are kept. E-mails sent and received by employees are backed up at regular intervals and are maintained on the server and a back-up system when the server gets filled. Due to HIPPA laws, they must retain these records. They also keep records of individual computer terminals in their offices. They are also retained under a personal user ID. Gentiva also has a system that retains records of when people log in or log out of the system.

At this point, Judge Perry read a stipulation to Cindy Anthony's employment.

The records for Cindy Anthony were then discussed. They include the records for the week of March 17, 2008. Mr. Camperlengo identified the deleted e-mails of Cindy Anthony for that week. The exhibits were then entered into evidence. The log-in records were also identified by the witness and entered into testimony.
I'm going for the basics here, not how the system works!

For March 17, the records showed that she logged on at 8:02 AM. The log-out periods were in the area of 5:30. March 21, the first session was 8:43 AM. and logged out at about 5:30. The system would automatically log you out after five hours if not in use.

Then, the journal activity for the week was discussed. It contains all the activity dealing with records were documented. Finally, after a lot of technical discussion, Ms. Burdick had the witness go down to the afternoon portion of the document. She started with 2:27 PM and went down through 2:33 PM at the bottom of the screen. There were several changes made to patient profiles during that time frame. (Somehow, the numbers came out differently the second time Ms. Burdick stated them, suffice it to say, whatever the numbers were, they covered the time that Cindy said she was probably home Googling.)
Ms. Burdick then went to the March 21 records. The times were approximately from 2:37 PM until the end of the day. There was continuous activity throughout the afternoon until 4:06 PM.

There was discussion about individual passwords which are changed every 90 days. Mr. Camperlengo explained that it is an extremely secure system due to law.

Ms. Burdick then had the witness testify that Cindy was entering data on the system between 1 and 3 PM on March 17. She was. On March 21, she was also entering data between 1 and 2 PM.

Ms. Burdick was finished with the witness.

Jose Baez asked if he was contacted in the summer of 2009 for any of this data. Camperlengo testified he hadn't.

Baez had no further questions.

The witness was excused.

The next witness was Deborah Polisano, one of Cindy Anthony's co-workers at Gentiva.

Frank George did direct. She was employed by Gentiva in Winter Park. She was Director of Clinical Management. She managed 20 to 25 people and field staff. She was Cindy's supervisor. She was responsible for oversight of her job performance.

In March of 2008, Cindy was a Manager of Clinical Practice who had responsibility for field staff and their paperwork. She was not required to leave work during the day to do her job. All employees had to sign in and out. They would be allowed to run errands, but would not necessarily have to log out of their computers. They would lock themselves after 15 minutes. The system would be running, but the user would have to log on again.

Cindy was a capable, hard-working employee. She would not take 2 to 3 hour lunches. If an employee were gone for that period of time, she would have to do their jobs for them. She also said that other people could use the computer, but they would have to log on under their own user ID. It is against policy for someone to use another's user ID. It was a compliance issue.

Mrs. Anthony could not work from home and could not log onto her Gentiva account from another computer. Ms. Polisano said, although it was possible to fix someone else's time card, she never did that.

Mr. George entered Mrs. Anthony's time card history report. He first discussed March 14 where it said PTO (Part time off). There had to be 8 hours to be accounted for a PTO. On March 17, she arrived at 8:00 and signed out ten hours later at 6:00 PM. On March 21, she worked for 9 hours.

Ms. Polisano would approve the time. The time cards are a computer form. She gets them on Tuesday morning and she checks them for accuracy. Mr. George asked if a salaried employee was expected to work more than a 40 hour week. Ms. Polisano said they were. She also said that there were no situations where she knew Cindy to be at home but on the records. There was no "comp time."

Mr. George also brought up the banking issue and asked how far the bank was from the office. It was a couple of blocks away.

Mr. George finished.

Jose Baez asked if employees were allowed to run errands during the day. They were, Ms. Polisano said. Baez asked it a Bank of America record was shown to show her concerning the bank. (objection sustained)

Jose Baez brought up the July 15 trip to the tow yard. Polisano couldn't say how long Cindy was gone, probably 1 ½ to 2 hours. He asked if she'd reviewed her computer records for that day. Polisano said that she hadn’t. Cindy did work on her computer both before and after she left. Polisano had to force her to leave that day.

Baez had no further questions.

Frank George asked her that if she had to do another employee's work, she would do it under her own password on her own computer. Ms. Polisano agreed.

Jeff Ashton examined the next witness, Bruce Goldberger. He is a professor of toxicology at UF. He gave his background, which includes forensic toxicology. He took samples from a small piece of the left femur, marrow from the left femur, did two washes of the cranial cavity, some hair, some matted hair...(Jose Baez called for a side bar.).

When Ashton returned to the podium, Goldberger added soil from the matted hair to the list of items he took from the Medical Examiner’s Office for testing.

Ashton had Dr. Goldberger describe how he physically conducted the saline washes. He said he sealed the skull with a thin coat of epoxy of some sort, added 30cc of saline solution, swished it around and poured it out. He did that twice.

He ran an analysis of the saline washes and found nothing that would suggest decomposition material in the cranial cavity.

When Jeff Ashton finished, Jose Baez asked about the femur. Ashton objected and Judge Perry said he opened the door! Baez asked for a side bar to explain why he asked. Baez asked if he collected bone marrow and Goldberger said he did.

Baez asked if the saline wash was a crude method. Goldberger said it was, but it was the best way he had without opening the skull.

Baez asked if he didn't look for DNA. He didn't sent the samples for any DNA analysis. (objection/sustained three times). He returned the materials to the Orlando Medical Examiner's Office.

Dr. Michael Warren was called next.

Jeff Ashton had him re-introduce himself to the jury. He is a forensic anthropologist and belongs to a scientific working group which works to develop best practices in a field.

Ashton asked if there were any protocols that call for the opening of a skull in a forensic case. Warren said it wasn't and it wasn't considered "best practice" and hasn't even been discussed.

Dr. Warren pointed out that you can look and feel inside the skull. There is no compelling reason to open it except to photograph it. There are two negative consequences to opening the skull. A person asking to do a second examination would have lost evidence. Secondly, it was unnecessary desecration to the remains. (my words)

Ashton also elicited that there is a special instrument that could be used, a dental mirror could be used, and a flashlight could be used. Warren said that there are no skulls in his lab that need to have the skulls opened at the present time.

With a child's skull, you could fracture the fragile bones. He was shown the picture taken of Caylee's skull when Dr. Spitz opened it to identify the fracture he caused. He said that when he had examined the base of the cranium and there had been no such fracture.

Ashton then discussed documents about the treatment of human skulls. None of them recommend the opening of the human skull. Ashton brought up the UN document dealing with genocide which does not recommend it as well.

Jose Baez was again back to cross. Baez brought up the video he mad (objection/scope/sustained)

Baez brought up that he is not a forensic pathologist and he can't testify to what a forensic pathologist could do. He said that he considered this case a case for anthropology. Baez brought up his eminent forensic pathologist, Dr. Werner Spitz. (objection) Then he showed Goldberger the National Medical Examiners' guidelines and asked if he was familiar with it. He said he was.

Jose Baez asked if his method would locate red marks indicating a suffocation death (objection/sustained) When asked if it were necessary to open the skull, that would be up to the ME to decide. Warren agreed.

There was another question that I missed (objection/side bar/sustained)

Warren did not do the cranial washes in this case. When asked if he reviewed the autopsy, he pointed out that it wasn't an autopsy, but a bone case. He'd never seen the autopsy report or Dr. Goldberger's report.

Next question was objected to/sustained and Mr. Baez was finished.

The next witness was Sgt. Kevin Stenger, with more computer forensics.

Linda Burdick did the direct examination. The latest analysis he had done ran from March 1 to March 21, 2008. This was additional analysis of the Anthony's desk top computer. He provided two disks with reports from Cacheback and Net Analysis.

Jose Baez stated that he wanted more time to study the disks. Ms. Burdick asked for them to be accepted and Baez asked they be accepted conditionally. Judge Perry overruled him and Baez asked for a side bar conference.

Stenger did key word searches on the deleted Firefox history for:

chlorophyll
hand sanitizer
neck-breaking
Gentiva

Doing this keyword searches, he found no searches for chlorophyll. The same happened in the Cacheback report.

Hand sanitizer was only searched by "sanitezer" and it didn't come up.

Next, he searched for "neck" and found two searches, one with "neck break" and one with "neck breaking" It was not a pop-up ad.

Meanwhile, Baez objected to each of these and was overruled.

Sgt. Stenger found no searches for "bamboo" either and there was no access to a Gentiva website.

In addition, Stenger used another tool and searched the text file created and searched for these terms as well in Microsoft Word.

He did the search with two forensic programs and one with a hex file and found nothing.

He did find one search on how to get rid of fleas.

Another impeachment for Cindy Anthony.

Jose Baez asked about Yahoo.com. He got Stenger to agree that there is all sorts of information on it. He said that all Stenger did was search for were the domain addresses that were on the files for a month. He said that if the addresses didn't have the search word in it, he couldn't know what was on the page (as if it were Yahoo). There was mention of a search that included a possible martial arts website. You can't tell what's on a site unless you visited it.

Baez pointed out that Stenger was only contacted after the prosecution decided to impeach Mrs. Anthony. Baez also pointed out that he didn't look up alcohol and another topic. Stenger said he didn't do it because he knew they were there.

Sandra Osborne was up next. She has also testified before.

She was asked to perform a search for key words as well. She used EnCase.

She was asked to search the entire hard drive for:

chlorophyll
hand sanitizer
bamboo

She found one occurrence in the Microsoft Word dictionary.

Hand sanitizer did not appear on the computer.

Bamboo yielded bamboo furniture, figurines, floor surfaces, lamps, rugs, panda bears, tiki bars and other household items. There was no reference to bamboo leaves.

She found three specific log-in names for Gentiva and found no evidence of any remote log in to Gentiva.

Jose Baez referred to the unallocated space and the possibility of the material being overwritten.
He stated that it's not done in order, but her answer didn't make that clear. She said that it is hard to tell what has been overwritten because it's been deleted.

Ms. Burdick asked why there can be fragments of a chat. Osborne explained that it is because part of it has been overwritten.

The witness was excused and Ms. Burdick presented stipulations to Judge Perry.

Yuri Melich made another appearance on the stand. Ms. Burdick handed him the documents that were introduced. The first records were those for Mr. and Mrs. Anthony's land line. Then, there were records for George Anthony's cell phone. Finally, Det. Melich identified the cell phone records of Cindy Anthony.

(This is going towards impeaching the June 16 call Cindy made to George about the ladder being in the pool.)

Melich was asked to see if there were any calls from the home to George Anthony's land line or cell phone during the week of June 16. He testified that there were none.

Baez started out by asking if he knew that George Anthony had multiple cell phones. Melich said he wasn't aware of that.

Baez showed records to Melich to show that George Anthony had a company cell phone. (objections/sustained) Baez asked if he ever pulled his work cell phone records. Melich said he was unaware of a work cell phone, as Mr. Anthony had never told him that he had one.

(Somehow, there was something in the document he was shown that indicated George Anthony had a work cell phone? There were a bunch of objections about its being used and we never found out what it was.)

Baez then asked if he knew that the Anthony's had "boost cell phones." (objection/no time frame/sustained). (Remember, they did not have their phones until July!)

Jose Baez had no more questions and the witness was excused.

Ms. Burdick said the state was finished with their rebuttal case.

There was discussion at the side bar. Then, Judge Perry left the bench.

Judge Perry returned to the bench and asked if the defense was ready. He must have thought they would want to do a brief sur-rebuttal about George Anthony's phones. Cheney Mason said that they wouldn't do that.

The jurors were excused until Sunday at 9:00 AM for closing arguments.

Then there was the motion for judgement of acquittal made by Cheney Mason as well as several motions for mistrial including the one dealing with the video super-imposition.

In his motion for acquittal, he said there was as much evidence for an accidental drowning as for the prosecution "fantasy." He pointed out the questions that had not been answered as to how and where she died. He said there was no evidence of premeditation, except for the prosecution's "fantasy."

He said that the prosecution had proved only that Casey told many falsehoods for many reasons. They proved that she was a very loving and devoted mother through the testimony of her friends.

There was no proof that Caylee was chloroformed or duct-taped. There was no DNA linking the crime to anybody. There was no evidence the duct tape was placed on the face at all. The chloroform death was all media hype. He asked Judge Perry to take the burden from the jury to guess how the child died.

Ms. Burdick responded that Mr. Mason was arguing matters that were for the jury to decide. She said that the defense, during their presentation showed no proof of innocence.

Judge Perry denied the motion of acquittal.

We are done for the day. Tomorrow, everyone can have fun. Sunday there will be closing arguments and jury instructions. See you Sunday at 8:30!