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–Continued from Page 1 – Casey Anthony Trial: The Bushy Haired Stranger Defense and the Odds of an Acquittal
–Continued from BNN… Caylee Anthony: Bushy-Haired Stranger Defense, Anthony Acquittal Odds

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Jose Baez and Linda Kenney Baden were the only members of Casey’s defense team to be interviewed on The Today Show. Linda Kenney Baden is the wife of Dr. Michael Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police. Michael Baden is also known as yet another famous “hired gun” for high profile defense cases.

Both Michael and Linda Kenney-Baden were involved in the Phil Spector trial. Spector was accused of murdering actress Lana Clarkson. Dr. Baden testified as an expert witness while his wife gave the closing argument. The prosecutor in the case criticized the couple, claiming that Baden gave testimony which was tailored to help the defense win and that Baden and other scientific witnesses were “hired guns” who would “do anything for the money”. Another Casey Anthony “hired gun”, Dr. Henry Lee, suffered a blow to his credibility during the Phil Spector case when Superior Court Judge Larry Paul Fidler ruled that Lee hadn’t turned over evidence to the prosecution:

LOS ANGELES — The judge in the Phil Spector murder trial said Wednesday that he had concluded Dr. Henry Lee, a defense expert and one of the country’s most famous forensic scientists, hid or destroyed a piece of evidence from the scene of an actress’s shooting.

Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Larry Fidler said Spector’s defense can still call Lee as a witness, but prosecutors will be permitted to present evidence to the jury that Lee found potentially important evidence and failed to turn it over to the prosecution as the law requires.
–Court TV.com

Spector’s trial ended in a mistrial on October 2, 2007. Spector had been accused of murdering actress Lana Clarkson.

On February 6, Kenney-Baden and Baez appeared on The Today Show and began what I consider to be public relations work in the defense of the their client, claiming that Casey Anthony is innocent and that Baez wasn’t going to disclose what his defense will be:

“We have a defense in which we believe Casey Anthony is innocent and we will show that at the trial,” Baez said. “As much as we want to go out there and scream it from the top of the mountains, we don’t feel that’s in her best interests. It’s her against the world right now. Quite frankly, it doesn’t do any defense attorney any advantage by disclosing what their defense is before the trial.”

Even though Baez claimed he wasn’t going to “disclose” his upcoming defense of Casey Anthony, Kenney-Baden did reveal that the defense is planning to use the “Sam Sheppard”, or “The Fugitive” defense. This means that the defense will be relying on a case that was sensational for its time, a case where Dr. Shepard was convicted in 1954 of murdering his wife. Shepard claimed a “bushy haired stranger” was the culprit. The 1960’s television show, “The Fugitive” was based on Shepard.

In 1954, Sheppard’s pregnant wife was murdered in the couple’s suburban home near Cleveland, in Bay Village, Ohio, on July 4th. Sheppard testified during his trial that he was asleep downstairs when he awoke to his wife’s screams. When he ran upstairs, he was knocked unconscious by “someone”. When he “came to” he found his wife dead. When he went back downstairs he encountered a “bushy haired stranger” whom he chased outside the home down to the Lake Erie beach, where the “stranger” once again knocked him “out”.

Despite eighteen character witnesses and two other witnesses who claimed to have seen a “bushy haired” stranger in the area near the Shepard home on the 4th, Sheppard was convicted of second degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment.

After serving ten years in prison and several appeals, Sheppard was released after an appeals court ruled Sheppard was denied “due process”. The appeals court cited the “carnival atmosphere” of the trial, and that the judge had refused to sequester the jury. The judge had purportedly said on the first day of the trial, “Well, he’s guilty as hell. There’s no question about it.”

Even though Sheppard was released from prison, when his son, Sam Reese Sheppard, sued the state of Ohio for his father’s wrongful imprisonment in 2000, a jury unanimously ruled in favor of the state.

Using the Sam Shepard defense would mean the defense would have to prove someone else other than her mother Casey, murdered little Caylee. Since there are no witnesses to the crime, nor other suspects, other than the mysterious “nanny”, then the defense will have to rely on casting doubt on the prosecution’s forensic evidence, which is what Kenney-Baden alluded to during her appearance on the Today Show:

“This case may not be science, may not be accurate, may never have been tested, may not be reliable,” Baden said, pointing out that the defense team has yet to be given all of the state’s scientific evidence.

This will be the defense’s method of attack of the forensic evidence, casting doubt on the gathering, accuracy, reliability, and “science” of the evidence. Yet in the 1954 Sam Sheppard case, forensic evidence wasn’t the same as today with the advent of DNA and other scientific methods which were unknown in the 1950’s.

What the defense might try to prove is whether the forensic investigators for the prosecution “bungled” the evidence with faulty collection, “chain of evidence”, substandard testing procedures, or a relatively new science, the detection of the odor of human decomposition. The state of Florida has used the resources of FBI’s Quantico forensic unit as well as other accredited sources so the defense may find itself in an uphill battle in discrediting their findings, which most likely will be addressed by the numerous “hired guns” on Casey’s defense team.

What must the state prove in order to obtain a first degree (capital) murder conviction?

Continue reading: Page 3 – Casey Anthony Trial: The Bushy Haired Stranger Defense and the Odds of an Acquittal

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